Responsibilities for parties involved in Grambank - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki
The Grambank team consists of more than one hundred global members. Each member has a role in the project, and some members have more than one role. These roles are listed below and explained further below.
- Coders
- Feature patrons
- Node leaders
- Database coordinators
Besides assistants, PhD students, postdocs and other scholars employed or otherwise engaged in the Grambank project in the roles listed above, we have also benefitted greatly from scholars and experts who have lent us their expertise on specific languages. See this section in the wiki article on the background of the questionnaire for their names. These experts are not ultimately responsible for the data but have generously volunteered their time and energy. We are grateful that we may share in their knowledge.
Coders
Coders are responsible for data input. They become familiar with the comparative concepts and features by reading the wiki articles and training. They reserve languages for coding. They critically read the descriptive literature and translate the information from grammars into feature values. They regularly report their progress to the project leaders. They contact language experts when appropriate and needed. They submit coded sheets with pull requests. They bring up feature and coding issues with the node leaders and patrons. They also revise existing coding.
Feature patrons
The feature patrons keep the feature documentation in this wiki up to date. They help the coders with the interpretation of features when issues arise. They also clarify definitions of features when this is necessary, without majorly altering the interpretation of the features. They make decisions in case a feature is difficult to code for a particular language. They make sure that such decisions are clearly communicated to the coders and the node leaders. The current feature patrons are Jeremy Collins, Hannah Haynie, Jakob Lesage, Jay Latarche, Hedvig Skirgård and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich. Harald Hammarström is a former patron. Tobias Weber has also aided patrons significantly in his role as node leader and during revisions of wiki articles.
Node leaders
A Grambank node is an place or institute that hosts or supports a group of coders. There are and were nodes in the Australian National University in Canberra, in the University of Colorado Boulder, in SOAS, in Nijmegen, in Uppsala, in Kiel and in Leipzig. Each node has a node leader. Node leaders support coders in their node and respond to immediate questions that can be solved without a general discussion. They keep track of discussions and are a link between the project leaders and patrons on the one hand and coders on the other hand. The node leaders for each node are listed in the table below.
| Node | City | Institution | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOAS/ELDP | London, UK | SOAS & ELDP | Jay Latarche, Jeremy Collins (formerly) |
| Kiel | Kiel | Institute for Scandinavian Studies, Frisian and General Linguistics Department of General Linguistics Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel | Alena Witzlack-Makarevich & Tobias Weber |
| Leipzig | Leipzig | DLCE, MPI-EVA | Hedvig Skirgård |
| Colorado | Boulder | University of Colorado Boulder | Hannah Haynie |
| ANU (inactive) | Canberra, Australia | ARC CoEDL & ANU | Hedvig Skirgård |
| Uppsala (inactive) | Uppsala, Sweden | Dept of Linguistics & Philology, Uppsala Univeristy | Harald Hammarström |
Database coordinators
Database coordinators oversee the practical implementation of the project as a database, both collaboratively maintained continuously at GitHub and as a released dataset for publication in CLDF-format. The main database coordinators are Robert Forkel and Johannes Englisch, with additional input from Simon Greenhill and Hedvig Skirgård. Harald Hammarström was the main database coordinator before Forkel.