Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action!

Diversity is an important characteristic of any healthy ecosystem, including scholarly communications. Diversity in services and platforms, funding mechanisms, and evaluation measures will allow the scholarly communication system to accommodate the different workflows, languages, publication outputs, and research topics that support the needs and epistemic pluralism of different research communities. In addition, diversity reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, which inevitably leads to monopoly, monoculture, and high prices. Bibliodiversity has been in steady decline for decades.1 Far from promoting diversity, the dominant “ecosystem” of scholarly publishing today increasingly resembles what Vandana Shiva (1993) has called the “monocultures of the mind”2, characterized by the homogenization of publication formats and outlets that are largely owned by a small number of multinational publishers who are far more interested in profit maximization than the health of the system. Yet, a diverse scholarly communications system is essential for addressing the complex challenges we face. As we transition to open access and open science, there is an opportunity to reverse this decline and foster greater diversity in scholarly communications; what the Jussieu Call refers to as bibliodiversity3. Bibliodiversity, by its nature, cannot be pursued through a single, unified approach, however it does require strong coordination in order to avoid a fragmented and siloed ecosystem. Building on the principles outlined in the Jussieu Call, this paper explores the current state of diversity in scholarly communications, and issues a call for action, specifying what each community can do individually and collectively to support greater bibliodiversity in a more intentional fashion

Disrupting Digital Monolingualism: A report on multilingualism in digital theory and practice

This report is about the Disrupting Digital Monolingualism virtual workshop in June 2020. The DDM workshop sought to draw together a wide range of stakeholders active in confronting the current language bias in most of the digital platforms, tools, algorithms, methods, and datasets which we use in our study or practice, and to reverse the powerful impact this bias has on geocultural knowledge dynamics in the wider world. The workshop aimed to describe the state of the art across different academic disciplines and professional fields, and foster collaboration across diverse perspectives around four points of focus: Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures; Working with multilingual methods and data; Transcultural and translingual approaches to digital study; and Artificial intelligence, machine learning and NLP in language worlds. Event website https://languageacts.org/digital-mediations/event/disrupting-digital-monolingualism/ This report forms part of a series of reports produced by the Digital Mediations strand of the Language Acts & Worldmaking project, in this case in collaboration with the translingual strand of the Cross-Language Dynamics project (based at the Institute of Modern Languages Research), both funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open World Research Initiative. Digital Mediations explores interactions and tensions between digital culture, multilingualism and language fields including the Modern Languages

The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until early 2014; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the situation of funding for LT topics. This paper documents the initiative’s work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Postprint (published version

The strategic impact of META-NET on the regional, national and international level

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Linguistic commodification in tourism

Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2012 in Switzerland, Catalunya and different zones of francophone Canada in sites related to heritage and cultural tourism, we argue that tourism, especially i n multilingual peripheries, is a key site for a sociolinguistic exploration of the political economy of globalization. We link shifts in the role of language in tourism to shifts in phases of capitalism, focusing on the shift from industrial to late capitalism, and in particular on the effects of the commodification of authenticity. We examine the tensions this shift generates in ideologies and practices of language, concerned especially with defining the nature of the tourism product, the public and the management of the tourism process. This results in an as yet unresolved destabilization of hitherto hegemonic discourses linking languages to cultures, identities, nations and States

New and future developments in EXMARaLDA

We present some recent and planned future developments in EXMARaLDA, a system for creating, managing, analysing and publishing spoken language corpora. The new functionality concerns the areas of transcription and annotation, corpus management, query mechanisms, interoperability and corpus deployment. Future work is planned in the areas of automatic annotation, standardisation and workflow management

English language in rural Malaysia: situating global literacies in local practices

This paper claims that underlying the naturalisation of teaching and learning of English in the Malaysian education system are ideological pressures and political dogmas, often emerging from colonial, urban/rural and even local ethnic conflicts and hierarchies. It suggests therein lie the inherent difficulties of teaching and learning English in rural communities in Malaysia. Three paradigms frame this view in the paper: the overarching view of literacy as a situated and variable social process; the use of an ethnographic perspective in investigating English language and literacy education in Malaysia; the stance on the need for Malaysians to acquire English as an additive rather than as a deficit philosophy

Language Aspect in Education As an Aspect of Intercultural Rivalry

This article considers how the modern phenomena of multilingualism, multiculturalism and media diversity are different from those of previous periods. With the promotion of multiculturalism as a constructive interaction of cultures, the “clash of civilizations” is also actively discussed as is the fact that, despite the expansion of compulsory multilingualism in education, the dominance of only one language is consistently growing, including officially multilingual Europe. In this regard, it is important to consider such sociocultural processes against wider sociopolitical, cultural and philosophical contexts. The mobility of modern people and their communication with each other is much greater than before, but the language barrier is overcome not so much by their multilingualism or a new lingua franca (English), but by the creation of tourist and business infrastructures, whose employees learn several foreign languages, and only in a small necessary amount. In addition, a small number of professional translators are used when and where a highly qualified translation with a very precise semantic understanding is required. In the future this role might well belong to translation machines. With these realities, as well as with some of the rights of the child, the obligatory study of two or more languages, in most cases the English, provides a stark contrast. The main justification for such a policy is that it supposedly increases the chances of employment. Yet this is an ideological construct, the implementation of which is consuming an ever-increasing proportion of budgetary funds and personal time of students and teachers. Keywords: education, bilingualism, multilingualism, values, intercultural communication, intercultural rivalr

Information for All? The emergence of UNESCO's policy discourse on the information society (1990-2003)

The dissertation analyses the emergence of UNESCO’s policy discourse on the information society between 1990 and 2003. Taking into account the historical, political and institutional background of UNESCO and its history in the field of information and communication, the empirical analysis focuses on three different policy processes that contributed to this policy discourse: the INFOethics conference series; the creation of UNESCO’s intergovernmental Information For All Programme (IFAP); and the preparation of the Recommendation concerning the promotion and use of multilingualism and universal access to cyberspace. The empirical research is based on an analytical framework that combines Argumentative Discourse Analysis (ADA) with selected concepts and tools from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Building on extensive archive research and interviews, these approaches are combined in such a way as to make possible a detailed account of UNESCO’s policy-making and to analyse the emergence of its policy discourse on the information society as the outcome of discursive struggles among networks of actors