Volume 1, Number 1, 2017

EN:

In corpus linguistics, texts are typically annotated in order to focus the attention on: (a) the form of the text or words, and (b) the structure of sentences (that is, morphological and syntactic tagging). Yet, when dealing with language learning and the development of skills other than just linguistic ones, other types of annotations are needed. Annotating with either a specific learner or pedagogy in mind often engages the researcher in more complex issues than the ones just related to corpus linguistics. In this article, we report on the methods used to create a digital library of videos and annotated transcripts called FrancoToile ( http://francotoile.uvic.ca). As a needs-driven corpus, FrancoToile includes annotations within the video transcripts in order to help users develop their cultural and linguistic literacies in French. These annotations must relate directly to the purpose of the system (the development of cultural and linguistic literacies) and to the specific skill or competency that we hope language learners will gain. We analyze learning needs, modify the software, and observe and engage with users on an ongoing basis to create a language tool that will better address users’ needs. This approach of incorporating user feedback increases the usefulness of the annotated videos. We continue to seek means to encourage the involvement of users, both teachers and learners, in the process of corpora editing and content building.

EN:

In light of the challenge and promise currently facing scholarly publishing’s move to digital models of greater openness, this paper offers a point of historical reflection on an earlier era of concern over sustainable access to learned works. It reports on a period of great turmoil in publishing that ran from the end of British book licensing in 1695, which unleashed a great wave of print piracy and sedition, to the legal remedy afforded by the Statute of Anne 1710, which introduced what we now think of as modern copyright law. The paper begins with John Locke’s lobbying of Parliament to end the effrontery of press censorship and monopoly maintained by the three-decade old Licensing Act of 1662. The scholar-friendly legal reforms of this act that Locke proposed in the 1690s were not taken up by Parliament when it allowed the act to expire in 1695. However, six years after Locke’s death in 1704, his and others’ proposed reforms were to find a place in the Statute of Anne 1710. This legislation was the first to vest authors with an exclusive, limited-term right to print copies of their work, while also protecting the access rights of scholars and the public to these and other works. I argue that the history of the statute reveals how the age of copyright began with striking a fine legislative balance between the interests of learning and those of commercial publishing, while also offering further insight into Locke’s influential work on property rights and limits. My hope is that this portrayal of Locke’s relatively effective political intervention as scholar-activist and public defender of learning in relation to the subsequent Statute of Anne might inspire and lend weight to the academic community’s current grappling with the growing commercial dominance of scholarly publishing.

EN:

The infrastructures that underpin scholarship and research, including repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards, are public goods. Finding sustainability models to support them is a challenge due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of an infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it. The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests that there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compelling all potential users, often through some form of taxation, to support the infrastructure; providing non-collective (club) goods to contributors that are created as a side-effect of providing the collective good; or implementing mechanisms that lower the effective number of participants in the negotiation (oligopoly).

In this paper, I use Olson’s framework to analyse existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. This approach provides some important insights. First, it illustrates that the problems of sustainability are not merely ones of finance but of political economy, which means that focusing purely on financial sustainability in the absence of considering governance principles and community is the wrong approach. The second key insight this approach yields is that the size of the community supported by an infrastructure is a critical parameter. Sustainability models will need to change over the life cycle of an infrastructure with the growth (or decline) of the community. In both cases, identifying patterns for success and creating templates for governance and sustainability could be of significant value. Overall, this analysis demonstrates a need to consider how communities, platforms, and finances interact and suggests that a political economic analysis has real value.