Call for Book Chapters:
The March of Data: Linguistics across Disciplinary Borders
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Series: Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities
Series editors: Mikko Laitinen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland, and Jukka Tyrkkö, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Editors
- Steven Coats, University of Oulu, Finland. Email: steven.coats@oulu.fi
- Veronika Laippala, University of Turku, Finland. Email: veronika.laippala@utu.fi
Important Dates
- Chapter Proposal (Abstract) Submission: March 15, 2022 (see details below)
- Notification of Proposal Acceptance: April 15, 2022
- Full Chapter Submission: September 15, 2022
- Notification for chapter acceptance: November 15, 2022
- Submission of the camera-ready chapters: January 15, 2023
- Anticipated book publication: Early 2023
Scope and Purpose
New approaches in language studies and linguistics have emerged in recent years that blur disciplinary boundaries, facilitated by factors such as increased access to large data sets (e.g. from social media or digitization projects), the application of new methods of data analysis and visualization, the sharing of code and data on platforms such as CLARIN or GitHub, as well as by continual advances in technologies related to data storage, retrieval, and processing.
The march of data denotes an area at the border region of traditional humanities and social science disciplines, but also the inevitable development of the underlying technologies, tools, and methods that drive analysis in these fields.
For our planned volume, we invite submissions that highlight the ways in which new data, tools and methods can engage with topics in language studies, linguistics, social sciences, and digital humanities. We especially welcome proposals that include detailed description, commentary, and interpretation of “black box” methods that in conference papers or other short contributions are sometimes only glossed over. Potential topics and thematic fields may include:
- Computer-mediated communication (CMC): An ever-increasing proportion of human interaction is mediated by digital technologies. We invite papers that focus on CMC data such as forums, blogs, newsgroups, SMS and WhatsApp messages, text chats, wiki discourse, social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, or LinkedIn, pseudo-anonymous “chans” such as 4chan, or streaming platforms such as Twitch or webcam sites, especially in the context of computational sociolinguistics.
- Digital humanities: Language data give us insight into processes and developments in specifically linguistic domains such as (e.g.) lexis, grammar, or syntax, but can also shed light on language-mediated aspects of human experience such as culture, history, politics, and economic behavior. We welcome papers in which English language data are utilized in order to investigate questions in the Digital Humanities.
- Big data, maps, and visualization: Researchers in many linguistics, humanities and social science subjects now often work with large data sets that are annotated with geographic or other metadata, allowing the creation of maps and other types of visualizations. We invite papers that report on the collection and visualization of (for example) language data, and particularly papers that discuss interactive visualization and mapping tools, as well as new innovative methods such as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technologies.
- Web-as-corpus: The Internet has revolutionary potential for linguistics, computational linguistics and language studies. The massive amount of data available online contains new ways of writing and presents unprecedented possibilities to explore, for example, language, communication and culture. We invite papers that use the Web as a corpus for research in linguistics and computational linguistics, discuss the challenges related to this, or present methods allowing to better benefit from Web data.
- Machine learning: How can machine learning and AI be used for the study of language, for example in genre or register classification or in the preparation and annotation of multimodal language data? What are the current best practices and where are we heading? We encourage the submission of papers that utilize machine learning or neural network approaches for the identification, analyses and classification of humanities and social science data as text or as sound, image and video.
Submission Deadlines
PROPOSAL SUBMISSION: Prospective authors should submit a chapter proposal by March 15, 2022 including the following information:
- Title of the contribution/chapter
- Name, affiliation, and email address of each author
- Preliminary abstract of the proposed chapter (150 – 250 words)
Please submit proposals per email to both Steven Coats and Veronika Laippala (steven.coats@oulu,fi, veronika.laippala@utu.fi) using the cc function. Please write “March of Data: chapter proposal” in the subject field.
PROPOSAL ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION: Authors will be notified by April 15, 2022 about the status of their proposals. In this process, we will consider whether the proposal fits the scope of the book and how well the subject of the proposal is integrated with the other book chapters.
FULL CHAPTER SUBMISSION: Chapters should be between 10,000 and 15,000 words and will be reviewed by two/three expert reviewers to ensure the quality of the volume. All contributions must be original work which has not been published elsewhere nor is currently under review for any other publication. The deadline for submission is September 15, 2022.
CHAPTER ACCEPTANCE NOTIFICATION: Authors of submitted chapters will be notified of acceptance/rejection and reviewers’ comments by November 15, 2022.
CAMERA-READY CHAPTER DUE: Camera-ready, revised versions of the accepted chapters should be submitted by January 15, 2023.
BOOK PUBLICATION: The book is anticipated to appear in print in early 2023.
Inquiries and submissions can be sent to Steven Coats (steven.coats@oulu.fi) or Veronika Laippala (veronika.laippala@utu.fi). Please use the subject “March of Data book”.