Developing Web Interfaces to Spoken Language Data Collections

Recent years have seen a massive increase in the use of digital technologies for recording and analyzing audio spoken language data. This has, without doubt, enabled new approaches and wider access to the analysis of spoken language data across disciplines, especially within linguistics. The benefits of these technologies are widely acknowledged by researchers. However, researchers have paid less attention to the difficulties of keeping track of these digital recordings and to their maintenance and management. That is, the long-term preservation of these materials is not straightforward, and, if not properly cared for, digital recordings may be easier to lose or lose access to than their analog counterparts (Bird and Simons 2003). A consideration of the best methods of organization and preservation for these digital resources leads in turn to a fuller understanding of the great possibilities that current technologies enable in terms of the ways that we present, interact with, and analyze audio-based language data (cf. Kendall 2008). This paper discusses two related projects, the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP) and the Online Speech/Corpora Archive and Analysis Resource (OSCAAR), to exemplify some of the benefits of developing web interfaces to spoken language data collections.