Interviewer: There we go. So thank you again for agreeing to this interview. As you can see, it's being recorded. And as a reminder, it is the transcript that will be shared with the research community. That means that the video and audio file will only be used by myself and my student research assistants to create the transcript. Are you OK with that?

Interviewee 26: Yes.

Interviewer: Brilliant. And so I'd like to begin with a very easy question, I should think, which is this is a study about open science practices in linguistics. But linguistics is a very broad field. And so my first question is, where do you situate yourself and your research within this field of linguistics?

Interviewee 26: Okay, thank you. Well, I am coordinating the research area called the PROJECT in English at the linguistics department. And I can directly say that, yeah, my research is based on qualitative analysis rather than quantitative analysis. If I'm allowed, I can mention two examples to justify my own background with this engagement with data. One thing that I can mention is due to my previous, let's say, employment in PROJECT, because I have something like 20 years of research on PROJECT. And for example, I got at some point a generous funding from the DFG to work on PROJECT. And that was an PROJECT group. Very, let's say, very unheard of for PROJECT to have an PROJECT grant. I still remember how my colleagues were then you will skip this in the transcription because it's not possible to anonymize, but anyway, I remember my colleagues in CITY. That was at the INSTITUTION. Completely horrified by the idea that I could share ideas with my PhD students and we could publish together. Just to give you an idea about, you know, the Fachkultur, how different it was at least, let's say, up to 10 years ago. Now, honestly, I don't think that the situation improved, but anyway, so yeah, what we did is since the project was on the PROJECT. And, you know, we have the PROJECT, so the online. So it's a brilliant collection of PROJECT. And so you can do search. You can do pretty much wonderful searches for a word, for lemmas and different clusters of words and so on. But for me, since PROJECT was and still is understudied, somehow for me, the main work was qualitative because somehow I needed to check manually what is happening in these passages because it's very intangible what PROJECT do, right? And this is common to PROJECT in many other modern languages. So, yeah, so that's an example due to my, let's say, past research. But I can mention also a recent project of mine, which is called PROJECT. Having said that, yeah, precisely because I'm coming from PROJECT originally, I can mention an exceptional example of open access that I experienced with my own writing, namely an illuminating now very senior scholar in PROJECT decided as he was directing a center for learning studies in CITY, so a center of research depending on INSTITUTION, he decided that he wanted to publish monographs that are exclusively accessible to people.

Interviewer: Cool.

Interviewee 26: So first of all, online editions before print editions. And then print editions, if printed editions had to follow, then his idea has constantly been, let us produce, you know, kind of, you know, relatively affordable and cheap books so that people can buy these books without, you know, too many troubles. And so and this was remarkable for me because when at the end of this project that I already mentioned to you on articles, we published first a huge work in five volumes online in 2016. And then we wanted also to have a printed version. The printed version came out much later in during the pandemic in 2021. And it is a bit less than 1,000 pages. So it's a very thick volume. But it costs $38, which is nothing somehow. And this is just because of this policy of this particular director who systematically I would say and almost ideologically always wanted to have material published that is easy to access and not something like these prototypical volumes with this thick cover that costs I don't know 150 euro. And then you know libraries can afford sometimes not always but can afford the purchase but then for normal people and also for scientists is almost impossible to get them. So this is something that I think is exceptional, but I think it's a nice example of choices that people can make to increase at least the access of people to materials being published.

Interviewer: Perhaps I can ask you because you're starting to answer this question, but I'd be interested to know what do you personally associate with open science in linguistics or in the humanities more broadly? I'm very interested in PROJECT as well, but what do you associate with open science?

Interviewee 26: What a nice question. Well, I do appreciate, for example, the idea of having the open data available, meaning also the implicit processes that usually are not specified in scientific articles, but still are very important. For example, I remember in a past project, a pilot project that never unfortunately got funded, but the project was successful per se. I, together with two master's students annotating texts, we basically, we put together a manual, a little handbook of the annotation process. And the experience itself was extremely enlightening for me. We never published or never published yet this little manual in a way, but I like the idea that this is something that could be published so that somehow people can see what is behind, what is behind the decisions, what is behind the restrictions or the exceptions, how people decided to deal with the search for specific data. In that case, I can say that the data and the annotations were on PROJECT, and they basically were concerning PROJECT. So it was on PROJECT, only with people as reference, and it was a hugely interesting project. Yeah, so I remember this experience with the annotations. And even though, again, we didn't publish this manual, but the idea is lovely. And it's something that is absolutely not to be taken for granted. Yeah. And another point that I like to think about in connection with open science is, again, in the direction of transparency when it gets to data. So the treatment of data and the selection of data. And for me, it is very inspiring to think about the big message that I'm taking from PERSON. This is a person, I don't know, maybe the name sounds familiar to you. She is a professor of PROJECT in COUNTRY. And she's a prolific writer. She insists in her very much, let's say, student-oriented tips for research on PROJECT. She insists on the idea that before annotating data, the researchers should reflect and write about the researchers' state and position towards the data, on the one hand, and towards the engaging context where the data are collected. So there is this transparency link that is to my knowledge, or maybe my modest knowledge, is absolutely not to be found most of the times it sounds like data are falling from the sky, right? But nothing is neutral. I mean, we have this obsession with objectivity in working with data, but I do believe that we should be more honest with ourselves and clearly say that somehow the way we collect data, especially the way we select them, inevitably is based on decisions and intuitions that we have as researchers in a certain position and having only some material available rather than other material available. So she is great. I think that she is doing a great job whenever she insists on, I mean, her terminology is PROJECT. She says, we social actors, we are always linguists working on PROJECT especially, we are social actors ourselves and we deal with data collected about social actors, but social actors are not acting in a free space. We are all dealing with action that is mediated. All the time, maybe there is a computer in between, maybe because there is a social media in between, because there is, you know, I don't know, a camera, for example, a camera, the huge mediation of a camera when it comes to movie-related data is crucial. I mean, you cannot otherwise collect any rigorous scientific results. So, yeah, so I very much see myself ready to work more on that in my own research but especially to communicate this to students so that students somehow have less the sense of this myth right of data as something pure something that you know that is completely free from subjectivity. It's not true! At least in the humanities I don't think this is really true and it's better to be you know epistemologically humble enough to state what is behind this collection of data. If I can, I can mention another thing that I like very much, and this is, again, dealing with maybe something that I could call perspective-taking towards data, namely something that nowadays by the cognitive semiotician PERSON, working in CITY, is a kind of a mantra, namely in his own terms the PROJECT. He is a cognitive semiotician and he is defending very much the idea that phenomenology should not be treated any longer as a monster, as something that is exclusively introspectively related and something that is anthropologically very complex when it comes to the relationship between the subject and the thing and so on. However, he has this simple way of somehow translating the PROJECT in terms of first, second, and third person. So he's using this metaphor basically, and the idea is to try to encompass as much as possible methodologically speaking. Again, in dealing with the data, potentially all these three dimensions, namely the subjective dimension of the researcher, the I person directly engaged with the data and potentially and hopefully applying wisdom and previous knowledge and intuitions that are potentially very well motivated on the one hand. But then also there is the other dimension that he calls the PROJECT dimension of the second person, namely whenever we consult other people to see whether if other people see things as we are seeing. So, and here, you know, yeah, I mean, the reference is easy to interviews, but also co-coordinated annotations of phenomena so that then we can compare things and any other form of collaboration where multiple researchers are working on the same data. I can also mention the think aloud paradigm that I love at this moment, where people simply are asking other people not to answer questions, prefabricated questions, which are unfortunately very often channeling already the perspective and the observation. PROJECT. Okay, so that's kind of examples of second person, let's say, perspective. And then what he calls the third person perspective is somehow more related to quantitative work, namely to work with the data, what they're telling us in terms of numbers, things that are not related to subjective interpretation of people or our intuition, roughly. I mean, I know that this is a big problem, but since I'm not myself practicing very much quantitative measurements, I mean, I'm skeptical, slightly skeptical about yeah, this some at least some of the ways in which I see people worshipping, you know, literally worshipping measures, measurements and statistical results. Yeah, but I mean, but I should not say anything because I'm not in this subfield myself. What I can tell is that simply the idea behind this third person perspective in this PROJECT account is the idea basically of paying attention to something that could be potentially detached from the observation of people. Again, but if you ask me, I mean, I have been growing up, studying PROJECT linguistics. These are my two major fields in linguistics. And I'm a radical PROJECT person. So I do believe that there is no single meaning on earth that is falling from the sky, but everything is situated. So in a way, yeah, I mean, this is why I'm cautious if I talk about detached observations about data, because I wonder.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely something we talk about. I'm thinking now, so you've mentioned what your associations are with open science, and you've got some very concrete examples. As far as you can tell, I mean, this is from your perspective, your view of the field, how widespread are open science practices in linguistics at the moment?

Interviewee 26: I'm afraid, I mean, this is my own subjective opinion. I'm afraid it could be, it should be way more, way more known, more practiced, more talked about, even in courses. My own sense, but I'm also old, so I don't know. I mean, maybe new developments are simply escaping my mind because I don't know about them. But I'm afraid that my own little experience is telling me that it's not yet something that people have in mind systematically or yeah hopefully not yet but I think it takes maybe some time and it takes the the energies good energies of younger people younger scholars probably and again maybe it takes also I would say more again let me say directly more epistemic humility more a kind of a I don't know. Yeah, an attitude, a scientific attitude that is a bit less sure about how things are, just because there are components to be taken into account. So in this sense, the openness is interesting, because the openness side is interesting, I find, because it gives you an insight into how people think, how people connect phenomena, how people apply concepts, how people decide that something is corresponding to a category rather than another category. To me, meta-scientifically, this is hugely interesting. So it would be an advantage. It would be, I think, fair in a way, but it would be also, curiously enough, it would be also scientifically interesting because it's a meta-scientific attention, the way at least I see it.

Interviewer: Yeah, you've mentioned the younger generation and your hope that there will be more open science in the future in linguistics. As far like, yeah, from your perspective, from what you've experienced from the research community, do you think that it has to be a bottom-up approach? So the younger generation pushing open science practices forward? Or what do you think needs to be done to increase the uptake of open science practices?

Interviewee 26: Another very good question. My take would be, again, bottom-up. Bottom-up. To start with concrete experiences, concrete crazes, group work, courses, you know, something practical, something tangible, where exchanges between scientists and young scholars are possible. I think this probably would work more effectively than, I don't know, something like policies decided at some level, some hierarchical level. Or maybe both, maybe ideally both, because then if we have clear policies at our universities that say, okay, we are warmly invited to do this in this way and to keep some systematic operationalization of things could be facilitated indeed if there is some official requirement or some official policy that is shared by the community involved. But to raise the awareness, to create more possibilities, or simply to share ideas about things that could be done that are new, I do believe that the bottom-up way to go is probably way more effective.

Interviewer: And would you say that these initiatives have to be linguistics specific? So do we have to adapt open science practices in some way for linguistics? Or do these practices apply to all academic disciplines?

Interviewee 26: I would say it sounds like they should be applied to all disciplines. But with respect to linguistics, I think that some more or new work could be done, yeah, on the level of the data, the data from language use and the data from lab constrained, you know, linguistic material. So where are we taking our data from? And again, I mean, this kind of important level of the relationship with the data that we are working on, if it is linguistic data. And especially now that people are everywhere interested in the multimodality level of human communication, where also words might be involved. Yeah, it's even more important to have, I believe, to have this kind of open perspective towards the stages in the scientific process where we are dealing with this. Yeah, so maybe there might be ideas or not rules, but I don't know, conventions or joint, let's say, some joint attention to linguistic data that might be, let's say, yeah, specific. But in general, I do believe that all disciplines are potentially getting advantages from open science.

Interviewer: And it's interesting because we've been speaking about open science, but we haven't defined the term in any way, of course. And it's interesting because in the humanities, there are some people who don't want to use the term open science because it doesn't apply to humanities and prefer open research, for example, that would include the humanities or open scholarship, which is often thought more of an umbrella term to also include open education as well as open science slash research. And do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think that open science is suitable for linguistics or would you prefer us to use a different term?

Interviewee 26: I think open science is fine. It's fine because, I mean, the broad sense of science, of course, this is presupposing, of course, that we can consider linguistics as a scientific discipline. But if you ask me, I mean, also PROJECT literature might be a field that is dealt with scientifically speaking. Philologies, for example, I do believe that philologies actually apply a number of principles that are genuinely scientific principles. For example, they don't take for granted that every single word has been given and that's it, once forever. But they do care about when it was written and how, which material? I mean, the attitude, I think several attitudes in the humanities and in hard science fields are actually common. So I don't need to differentiate to the extent, again, that science is taken as some general set of practices and attitudes rather than something that is only for hardcore science.

Interviewer: Yeah, that's interesting. You may be aware that I co-organize ReproducibiliTea in the HumaniTeas, and the idea is to bring more open science to the humanities. If we're honest, we haven't been very successful. We have mostly reached out to people who are already convinced of open science and its benefits and so on. And so my question would be, what do you think could be done to reach linguists who are maybe not against open science per se, but maybe unaware or just not very knowledgeable about what's going on or what's possible? How can we stop preaching to the choir only?

Interviewee 26: Fantastic question. Fantastic and also difficult at the same time. Maybe since linguists, of course, linguists, even independently of the question of open science, like in other fields, tend to, yeah, tend to, let's say, have easier relationships with the linguists who think the same way or embrace the same perspective. Maybe something that could help is organizing events, for example, that are showing the advantages and the positive results, tangible results of open science so that the people who are skeptical or neutral or simply not interested per se, they might somehow see the appeal of changing a little bit the habit, I think it's a change of habit that is required mostly. And as we know, changes of habit are, yeah, I mean, they last some time, right? It's nothing that can happen in two days. But I am very optimistic, especially towards students, younger generations of scholars and students. So for example, maybe another idea could be to try to start from the study, from the teaching opportunities to talk about these things with students. Because if they have no consolidated opinion beforehand, then they might be more ready to get engaged and to develop this habit. So the sooner the better. Yeah. Otherwise, it might be difficult. So I would give up. OK, this maybe also needs not to be transcribed that I would give up, you know, try to convince all the generation scholars or professors about the benefits of open science. It's a waste of time. I would directly invest in younger groups, younger scholars. And also because now we have more and more the feeling that either we are nice to each other or we don't survive. I mean, in the humanities, we are constrained more and more because funding is less. Streamline research is still maybe surviving well, but, you know, interdisciplinarity, I don't think that is in general yet very much supported only in words, but not really in the practice. And so I think that this might be a way, you know, this awareness, this increasing awareness about how we do what we do. I think it might be a very good way also to keep somehow to keep the group together in a way. Okay, we might work in different ways with different perspectives on different sets of data. We linguist, I mean, somehow there are these practices and these openness, openness in the most general sense, that is something that we all could embrace. And maybe, who knows, maybe this itself is something that is making us appreciating more linguists who are doing something very different from what we are doing. Yeah, or something.

Interviewer: Yeah, reaching the end of my question, a catalogue of question, the last question is actually, what would you need personally to do more open science?

Interviewee 26: To have more chats with you.

Interviewer: Oh yeah, any time.

Interviewee 26: Yeah, that's easy because, you know, I'm lucky that you are working INSTITUTION. I mean, yeah, for me, definitely to talk to people directly about possibilities, projects. Yeah, of course, I can also read stuff, but for me, it's way more pleasant and convincing, you know, or not convincing, but somehow more efficient, more lively also to have direct exchanges with people who are doing work for these practices, who are trying to widen, you know, widen the range of activities and initiatives. Yeah. So I think this would be beneficial for me and also directly through you and your expertise and the expertise of other people who care particularly about this aspect to try little things together, something like little projects or how to incorporate this in the teaching, how to approach these topics with the students, for example. Yeah, so the methodological, the meta-scientific side, I think is particularly useful. And it's not enough, not enough has been done up to now, I believe.

Interviewer: Great. Yeah, that was the last question. Is there anything else you wanted to add on open science in linguistics or in the humanities?

Interviewee 26: I don't think so in this moment, but I thank you. I thank you very much for the opportunity because somehow, yeah, besides this time that we shared together, somehow I thought about that. I mean, in real terms, I mean, I thought about what could be done with the students, what could be done in terms of open educational resources. That is something that for me, it's completely new. Again, also, it's a way to get in touch more with other colleagues, you, and to get to know about initiatives that otherwise I would not know.

Interviewer: Yeah great. I'm going to stop the recording there.
