Task 1 (due Monday 28 April 2025)

This task is to be completed in pairs.

Read the two anonymised interview transcripts that were assigned to your group and compare them. Find answers to the following questions:

  1. What do the interviewees personally associate with Open Science? Which Open Science practices are they aware of?
  2. Which Open Science practices have they been involved in themselves?
  3. According to your interviewees, how widespread are Open Science practices in linguistics/their subdisciplines of linguistics?
  4. What are motivations for doing Open Science (in linguistics)?
  5. What are barriers to doing Open Science (in linguistics)?

Summarise your qualitative analyses of your interviews in bullet point format in the collaborative document using your group colour.

Background information about the interviews

The interviewees were conducted by Elen Le Foll from late February to early April 2025. The 26 interviewees are linguistics students (B.A., M.A. and PhD) and professional linguists (post-docs, lecturers, full professors, etc.). The interviews were conducted online over Zoom. They were first transcribed with the help of a locally-run large language model (WhisperX) and subsequently checked, corrected, and anonymised by Elen Le Foll and two student research assistants, Julia Weinberger and Vishar Kavehamoli.

To protect the identity of the interviewees, mentions of very specialised subdisciplines of linguistics and of all concrete projects were anonymised as PROJECT. Other aspects that were anonymised include mentions of specific institutions (INSTITUTION), cities (CITY), countries (COUNTRY), colleagues and supervisors (PERSON), etc.

Below are some descriptive statistics about the 26 interviewees.

Academic status of interviewees
Position n
Post-doc 7
Associate professor 4
Doctoral researcher 3
Full professor 3
Lecturer 3
M.A. student 2
No longer in academia 2
B.A. student 1
Librarian 1

Note that doctoral researchers are PhD students. The two interviewees who are no longer in academia had very recently completed a PhD in linguistics and had decided to pursue a job outside of academia.

Gender of interviewees
Gender n
F 15
M 11
Country in which interviewees’ affiliations are located
Country n
Germany 21
UK 2
Belgium 1
Norway 1
Sweden 1

These were the countries of interviewees’ affiliations at the time of the interview or, for the two interviewees who had quit academia just days prior to the interview, the country of the institution at which they completed their PhD. Of the interviewees with an affiliation in Germany, eight were affiliated with the University of Cologne. Nine other German institutions are represented in the interviews. Of the institutions based in other European countries, none are represented more than once.

At the start of the interviews, the interviewees were asked in which subdiscipline(s) of linguistics they situate themselves and their research. Almost all mentioned several subdisciplines, some of which were anonymised either because they were highly specialised or because the combination of the subdisciplines mentioned made it potentially possible to identify the interviewees. Across all 26 interviewees, the following subdisciplines were mentioned (ordered by frequency of mentions): corpus linguistics (11), phonetics (7), applied linguistics (5), sociolinguistics (5), discourse analysis (4), language teaching (4), phonology (4), second language acquisition (4), language learning (3), psycholinguistics (3), theoretical linguistics (3), English linguistics (2), World Englishes (2), cognitive linguistics (2), computational linguistics (2), language documentation (2), pragmatics (2), typology (2), variational linguistics (2), German linguistics (1), Romance linguistics (1), Slavic linguistics (1), classics (1), cognitive semantics (1), corpus phonetics (1), dialectology (1), experimental linguistics (1), generative linguistics (1), heritage language research (1), language testing (1), learner corpus research (1), lexicogrammar (1), linguistic landscaping (1), morphology (1), multilingualism (1), neurolinguistics (1), semantics (1), sociophonetics (1), speech science (1), syntax (1), teacher training (1), translation studies (1), variationist linguistics (1).