Practicing Citizen Sociolinguistics
References –Purschke, Christoph (2017a): Crowdsourcing the linguistic landscape of a multilingual country. Introducing Lingscape in Luxembourg. In: Hundt, Markus, Christoph Purschke & Evelyn Ziegler (eds.): Sprachräume: Konfigurationen, Interaktionen, Perzeptionen. Linguistik Online 85(6), 181–202.
Purschke, Christoph (2017b): (T)Apping the linguistic landscape. Methodological challenges and the scientific potential of a citizen-science approach to the study of social semiotics. Linguistic Landscape 3(3), Methodology in Linguistic Landscape Research, 246–266.
Purschke, Christoph & Kerstin Trusch (2021): Mit Lingscape auf Pad in der Stadt. Ein Schulprojekt zu gesellschaftlicher Mehrsprachigkeit in Windhoek. In Marten, Heiko / Ziegler, Evelyn (eds.): Linguistic Landscapes im deutschsprachigen Kontext: Forschungsperspektiven, Methoden und Anwendungsmöglichkeiten im Unterricht und Sprachmarketing. Berlin: Peter Lang, 403–424.
In 2016, the Lingscape project was created to survey Luxembourg's linguistic landscape (Purschke 2017a). Using a mobile research application to collect, locate and annotate photos of language in public seemed like a promising approach to crowdsource a large dataset by involving a lay audience in a participatory project about linguistic diversity and its social implications. The app was first promoted mainly to a Luxembourg audience through national media, which was met with limited resonance.
As a result of social media campaigning and networking, however, data collection quickly spread to various countries. As interest in the research community grew, we decided to transform the project into a shared platform for linguistic landscape research by opening it to external projects. In doing so, its participatory basis shifted from a crowdsourcing approach to co-creating the platform and its functions with the community (Purschke 2017b). E.g., based on user input, the data scheme was expanded by providing modular analytical taxonomies for data annotation. Further additions to the app comprise working groups for projects, nicknames for users, and an API to facilitate data management.
Since its beginnings, Lingscape has seen a lot of interest from researchers and education professionals, enabling dozens of satellite projects on the individual and institutional levels. The platform has been constantly improved and expanded with the community, e.g., to provide solutions for using the app in classroom environments (Purschke & Trusch 2021). A small team manages project development and maintenance without third-party funding that keeps the app running, implements new functions, and handles outreach and user engagement. While this setup gives us complete control over the platform, it has produced many challenges along the way, be it obstacles in app development, securing funds to keep the app up to date, managing incoming data, or designing new sets of analytical descriptors that fit the needs of a specific satellite project while still being helpful for the larger community. Implementing a citizen science approach to research linguistic landscapes through the Lingscape platform can be considered a success story, one from which lessons could be learned to implement comparable projects.
In this talk, we will discuss some of the significant challenges we encountered along the way - and some of the advantages of running a small-scale participatory research project. Using the example of platform development, we will demonstrate the impact of user participation on data collection, analysis, and the implementation of new functions. One particular challenge of running a participatory platform is the necessity for constant outreach and service to the community, which sometimes may have unexpected consequences for personal work planning, depending on the complexity of satellite projects. Also, the freedom given to users to pursue their projects translates into manifold challenges regarding data consistency, be it missing language labels for uploads or the varying use of analytical descriptors between projects. At the same time, the collaboration with Lingscapers worldwide allows for various impressions and results from linguistic landscapes, reaching far beyond the initially planned scope of the project. We will examine best practices for participatory sociolinguistic projects and highlight the potential of citizen science approaches for research on linguistic landscapes.