Introduction to the Special Issue on Archiving Sociolinguistic Data

1. Background The growth in computing power, storage, and networking has encouraged and enabled an increasing interest in big data, which one might define as volumes beyond what any individual researcher can collect and analyze directly. In linguistics, this naturally leads to increased emphasis on data sharing, which is one way to amass data of sufficient size and variety to permit new kinds of insight. At the same time, there is a growing consensus among sociolinguists that researchers must refine their views on demographic, situational, and attitudinal factors that correlate with linguistic differences in order to permit not only more effective data sharing and comparison but also more accurate conclusions.