Toward the Harmonization of Metadata Practice for Spoken Languages Resources

This paper addresses issues related to the elicitation and encoding of demographic, situational and attitudinal metadata for sociolinguistic research with an eye toward standardization to facilitate data sharing. The discussion results from a series of workshops that have recently taken place at the NWAV and LSA conferences. These discussions have focused principally on the granularity of the metadata and the subset of categories that could be considered required for sociolinguistic fieldwork generally. Although a great deal of research on quantitative sociolinguists has taken place in the Unites Stated, the workshops participants actually represent research conducted in North and South America, Europe, Asian, the Middle East, Africa and Oceania. Although the paper does not attempt to consider the metadata necessary to characterize every possible speaker population, we present evidence that the methodological issues and findings apply generally to speech collections concerned with the demographics and attitudes or the speaker pools and the situations under which speech is elicited.