Interviewer: There we go. And recording has started. You've sent me the consent form and you have read it. But as a reminder, this is being recorded, and the audio and video will be used by myself and my student research assistants to create a transcript. And it's the anonymized transcript that will be shared as part of the publication of the result and the findings of this research. Is that okay with you?

Interviewee 22: Yes.

Interviewer: Good. So this is a project about linguistics and open science practices. So my first question is linguistics being such a broad field, where do you situate yourself and your research within linguistics?

Interviewee 22: Well, I don't really do research yet because I'm still in my bachelor's. Where would I situate myself? Like maybe it's better if I start by just situating like the program. Where I think that stands, because I think that's the main part of where my direction comes from. So in CITY, linguistics, so generative linguistics aren't really practiced from what I saw. There's a big focus on typology, as far as I saw. Of course, phonetics, I think, is a bit different, but the general linguistics department is very focused on typological things, as far as I saw. And then I took a few courses to also get into like some generative syntactic theories, which I thought was very interesting. And other than that, right now, I'm going to focus a bit more on phonetics and phonological theories, prosody, that kind of thing. But yeah.

Interviewer: Nice. Yeah. We'll start with you and your personal beliefs and associations. What do you associate with open science? What springs to mind?

Interviewee 22: Well, I think it's an ongoing struggle in a way. I know that there exist a few websites and organizations that try to bypass laws, like copyright laws, to make science more accessible. And I think it's very sad that that has to happen in order for everyone to be able to access science and knowledge in general. Because, of course, if everyone could access knowledge freely, then I think that more people would also want to educate themselves and have opinions on stuff that's actually based on the science and not like second-hand information that always has more tendencies than what the raw data would have. So I think it's a very important topic.

Interviewer: And linguistics is traditionally thought of as a humanity. And so some people in the humanities think that open science is not necessarily a suitable term and prefer the term, for example, open research. And others have put forward the idea of open scholarship, which is meant to be a broader term that includes open science slash research and also open education. It's a lot of terms. I'm going to put them in the chat so you have an overview of them. Have you thought about this before? Does open science sound suitable to you for linguistics or not? What are your thoughts on this?

Interviewee 22: Well, I'll be honest. I haven't really thought about these categories specifically because I actually didn't really hear of them yet. But, I mean, if I look at the terms now, maybe I can say something substantial. Because, well, science specifically, well, if you have a large need for equipment, for example, or research facilities, expensive devices, for example, like brain scan stuff or something like that, I think it's maybe more appropriate to try and make that science as accessible, like the results of that science as accessible as possible to everyone. Whereas if you have a subject where the research mostly consists of reading texts and thinking about them methodologically, then maybe the facilities, like the resources to learn to be able to do that also need to be more accessible to everyone who tries to get into the topic, whereas in many sciences, like natural sciences, that might just not be all that easy to do. And I think, yeah, linguistics is situated at kind of a border between the different areas. And I would say that it is, it might be more accessible to like the general public or people who just aren't really inscribed at a university or whatever. Um in a in in a way that's much more, you know, not doesn't have quite as steep a learning curve as getting like into chemistry or whatever. So I think it's very important that yeah, like the resources, the access to education is also there. Yeah, but that's just like a spontaneous answer. I haven't really thought about the question.

Interviewer: No, sure. I'm looking for spontaneous answers. That's totally fine. Now, let's talk about your personal experiences. Have you been involved in any open science practices so far?

Interviewee 22: Not specifically open science practices, but I have been making some contributions to open source software, which I think is a very adjacent topic. I'm currently writing a citation style for Zotero that kind of, no, that doesn't just kind of, but that fulfills the requirements set by the INSTITUTION in CITY, which is a very specific citation style, kind of adjacent to APA, but a bit different. So yeah, that's a project I'm currently doing. I have been using Python to solve some tasks during my studies, like morpheme segmentation and stuff like that. But that all remained very simple. But, in any case, I published that online so people can generally use it. But I think that's as far as my contribution goes at this point.

Interviewer: Yeah, that's great. So that's publishing your code, publishing your software and then publishing the citation style sheet is definitely taking part in open science. Where did you learn about these practices and what or who encouraged you to do that?

Interviewee 22: It's actually a good question. Well, in this case, I've been using Linux for a pretty long time. And because that's an open source software, you kind of get more adjacent to the topic in a way. And there's the possibility that you get into it more. So I kind of came from the open source direction. And when I started studying here, there are quite a lot of left-leaning organizations on campus that also support the idea of open science very much. And I just kind of heard the idea and I thought it was very adjacent to, very similar to the philosophy of free software and open source software. And so I found it quite appealing in that regard.

Interviewer: Yeah, I know you've attended at least one, if I remember rightly, a session of ReproducibiliTea in the HumaniTeas. What was your motivation for attending that?

Interviewee 22: Um I was always interested in Docker. More specifically. I think like virtualization in general because I just saw some pretty fascinating applications of you know, what you can do with containers and everything. And I kind of wanted to get into that because I didn't really get the concept before. Yes. So that's why I went there specifically. I attended the second, I tried, I was trying to attend the talk on Wednesday and the Wednesday that followed where I think three people were trying to hold a presentation on reproducibility, but the internet failed that day. I think it was like a bigger blackout. So I had to stop halfway through, but that also was very interesting. Maybe not quite specifically the reason why I came there, but the reason why I wanted to go to the second event as well is because in a way, you'd think it's very basic stuff, right? Like the, difference, for example, between reproducibility and robustness, for example, that you treated in the second talk. But I hadn't really come into contact with any of these concepts before explicitly. I think you get an intuitive understanding of the scientific method and empiricism, but it's not really that specifically trained in other areas of what I did up until now in my studies. So that's why I grew more interested. The reason why I originally attended was again kind of from the software side of things.

Interviewer: Interesting yeah and now we'll try and move away from your own beliefs and experiences and try and think of the broader field of linguistics, as far as you can tell. So from what you you've read and the courses you've attended. How widespread are open science practices in linguistics at the moment?

Interviewee 22: Well, maybe I should also get into some other aspects. That isn't just accessibility to the general public, there's also like accessibility of like raw data. And I found that that often isn't accessible. I mean, I haven't read all that much linguistic studies up until, all that many linguistic studies up until now, but what I did read quite often just publishes the results. And there's sometimes an attachment, which are like an appendix where the raw data is shown, but not often in a machine-readable form. So that is one thing I've noticed. Definitely. Concerning accessibility to the general public, which I also think is a very important part of that. Most papers just aren't accessible, except for piracy websites, which isn't the ideal way to do it, in my opinion. So that's what I saw. But I've also, well, I've actually noticed sometimes some inconsistencies. For example, recently in a sociolinguistic paper about Japanese women's language, how Japanese differs between male and female speakers, there was kind of like a very questionable counting decision. Where female speech in the quotative used by a female speaker was considered female speech in the counting, but male speech in the quotative used by a female speaker wasn't considered male speech by a female speaker. So the author just kind of didn't treat that. And I only found it because she later showed examples. But she didn't explicitly treat it. So I think in this case, for example, it would be very helpful to have access to the raw data so you can actually understand what's going on there.

Interviewer: Yeah. And what do you think could be done to improve the uptake of open science practices in linguistics?

Interviewee 22: Yeah. Well, I think for starters, it would be helpful to generally make the raw data accessible when you publish papers. I think there are resources for that. Like if you can host large PDF files and image data, I think most publishers could probably also host raw data in a way. Like concerning the technological solutions, I've found, some ideas definitely in the classes I attended by PERSON, especially in general. Like containerization seems to be very, very good at that. But I don't think I can really judge how good it is compared to other methods. But yeah. I think it would need encouragement, maybe also from like a state side, financial encouragement, not only to provide capabilities for actually hosting raw data online, but also for encouraging publishers to make more papers and books just accessible to the general public as well, which of course would need to be financed, subsidized probably.

Interviewer: Yeah, that makes sense. I have one more question, which is almost a personal one. I have the feeling sometimes with ReproducibiliTea in the HumaniTeas, with other events that I organize or co-organize about open science and linguistics, that the people who come are the people who are already either aware of and convinced of these methods, these approaches to doing science. And my question would be, how can we reach out to the linguists who are either not interested or not aware, or maybe even outright against some of these practices?

Interviewee 22: Yeah, definitely. Many people seem convinced, and I think that's just kind of natural. I think one, well, for one, I think it would be, like kind of leading by example, right? Like just when you publish something, just kind of make it a standard to also link to the raw data, for example, or try to get papers published more accessibly. And, you know, if you just keep doing that, maybe it will pick up in a way. But then another point I feel like kind of might inhibit this although I don't have anything to base this on, really. But still, I think one aspect that inhibits it, like the accessibility especially, but also the publishing of raw data, is kind of an anxiety, either to not make any money off your hard work or, on the other hand, be proven wrong more easily, maybe. I think that's one component. And I think there's like this cultural formation of the lone scientist, like the genius in a way, that does things and, has the right to talk in a way, has achieved that right by studying for a long time or studying especially hard or whatever. And I think that kind of gives you a certain social status. And there's also, of course, a complex of media that publishes the results of scientific studies and interprets them, which also has an authoritative function. So I think there's like a whole construct of a whole structure of things that inhibit the ability of people or the willingness of people to actually show what they did and rather show the results. Because it's just that social status is sort of connected to that in a way. And I think that's one factor that really inhibits people's willingness to actually go through with the principles that most would probably agree with.

Interviewer: That's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that. That was the last official question, but is there anything else you wanted to add on open science, open research in linguistics or in the humanities more broadly for that matter?

Interviewee 22: Not really specifically. Just in general, I find very interesting what you do, and I hope I'll be able to participate a bit more in the future.

Interviewer: You're very welcome.

Interviewee 22: Just on a personal note. Thank you.

Interviewer: Thank you. I'll stop the recording there.
