The TROLLing Blog

Due to a major service upgrade, TROLLing will not be available for any action requiring login (deposit, curation, administration) from Friday March 24 after 16:00 CET until and including Tuesday March 28, 2023. In addition, on Monday March 27 and Tuesday March 28, TROLLing may also be unavailable for discovery and download in shorter periods. We apologize for any inconvenience. For questions, please contact the TROLLing Team at researchdata@hjelp.uit.no.

The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) is happy to announce the publication of the 100th dataset in the repository!

Congrats to Lukas Sönning from the University of Bamberg as the author of this special dataset in TROLLing! His dataset on the acquisition of two English vowel categories by German L2 learner (Sönning 2021) marks a further important milestone in the history of TROLLing. The dataset is part of a series of seven datasets that Lukas Sönning has published in TROLLing to support his dissertation Phonological variation in German Learner English (Sönning 2020) defended at the University of Bamberg.

We are glad that more and more researchers are discovering TROLLing as a curated and trustworthy repository for sharing their data in way that is aligned with the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (Wilkinson et al. 2016). Based on the Dataverse repository software, TROLLing was launched in 2014 and has ever since been operated by the University Library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The establishment of the repository was initiated by professors Laura A. Janda and Tore Nesset, both working with Russian linguistics at UiT. Laura and Tore’s mission was to provide linguists worldwide with a trustworthy, community-driven repository where they could share their research data, statistic code and other linguistic material and thus promote the transparency and reproducibility of linguistic studies. The repository is managed and curated by Helene N. Andreassen and Philipp Conzett, both Senior Subject Librarians for Linguistics at the UiT Library. TROLLing is a special collection within DataverseNO (https://dataverse.no/), which in 2020 was CoreTrustSeal certified as a sustainable and trustworthy repository.

Though 100 datasets over a period of more than six years may not seem a lot, the increasingly steady influx of dataset submissions from both established researchers and junior newcomers that we have seen during the last year indicates that focus on transparency and reproducibility of linguistic research is gaining ground in the international scholarly community.

Ever since the beginning, the curators of TROLLing have sought to learn from and contribute to the international discussion on good research data management. Since 2016 they have been active members of the Research Data Alliance Linguistic Data Interest Group, a community-based network which so far has worked out The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics (2018) and The Tromsø Recommendations for Citation of Research Data In Linguistics (2019). Several of its members have also contributed to the forthcoming Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management.

Alignment with international frameworks and best-practice recommendations is a key concern for TROLLing. Since 2018, TROLLing has been recognised as a CLARIN C Centre, and harvested by the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory (VLO). Being part of CLARIN/CLARINO, TROLLing is participating in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC), whose overall objective is to realise the social sciences and humanities’ part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One of the outcomes of the SSHOC project will be a new domain-specific metadata schema for TROLLing and other Dataverse-based repositories. This will make TROLLing even more compliant with CLARIN and more aligned with the FAIR principles. Also TROLLing’s participation in the FAIRsFAIR project aims at improving the FAIRness of the repository. Another important item on our road map is to assess the sustainability of the business model of TROLLing and adapt it to future challenges.

We would like to thank all our depositors and contributors and are looking forward to the next 100 datasets to be published in TROLLing!

Some key facts about TROLLing

### THE DEPOSITORS:

• 82 contributing authors
• Representing a total of 42 research organizations
• From 17 countries in 4 continents

(Source: https://douwe.com/projects/visited?region=world)

### THE DATA:

• 100 datasets containing 2 901 files
• Keywords: 630 (tokens) / 298 (types)
• Top 5 keywords:

• 36 languages represented
• Top 10 languages:

• 33 different file extensions
• Top 5 file extensions:

• Mostly replication data for article and book publications
• Linked to 64 related journal articles
• Top 3 journals:

• Linked to 8 related books
• Book publishers:

• In the last year, several datasets have been anonymised and shared with peer reviewers together with a journal or book manuscript. The private URL feature of the Dataverse software allows depositors to share their datasets before publication.

### THE USAGE (as of January 30, 2021):

• 11 082 downloads of (parts of) datasets
• At average 111 downloads per dataset
• Downloads per year:

Links and references

The TROLLing repository:

• Repository homepage: https://trolling.uit.no/
• Info site: https://info.trolling.uit.no/
• re3data entry: https://doi.org/10.17616/R3834T

Journals referring to TROLLing:

• Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/borealis/about/submissions
• Cognitive Linguistics; see Data Policy: https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/cogl/cogl-overview.xml
• Poljarnyj vestnik – Norwegian Journal of Slavic Studies: https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/vestnik

Organizations referring to TROLLing:

• Brooklyn College: https://libguides.brooklyn.cuny.edu/c.php?g=984874&p=7122659
• MIT: https://libguides.mit.edu/linguistics/open_sources
• Ohio University: https://libguides.library.ohio.edu/c.php?g=1068784&p=7781359
• The International Cognitive Linguistics Association (ICLA): https://www.cognitivelinguistics.org/en/publications-and-resources
• The University of Kansas: https://guides.lib.ku.edu/c.php?g=94923&p=1224538
• UC San Diego: https://ucsd.libguides.com/c.php?g=91028&p=6202117

Other references:

CoreTrustSeal certification of DataverseNO: https://www.coretrustseal.org/why-certification/certified-repositories/.

LIBER Disciplinary Case Study: The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing). PDF, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2668775

Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management. To appear. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-handbook-linguistic-data-management

Open Data in Linguistics – an interview with Laura A. Janda. Video, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FLQwJVM-VA

Sönning, Lukas. 2020. Phonological variation in German Learner English. University of Bamberg dissertation, https://doi.org/10.20378/irb-49135.

Sönning, Lukas, 2021, “The TRAP-DRESS contrast in German Learner English: Dataset for chapter 4 in “Phonological variation in German Learner English””, https://doi.org/10.18710/ATIRRV, DataverseNO, V1, UNF:6:InisFzv6Q0s2HMUf96W1KQ== [fileUNF]

The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics. 2018. https://site.uit.no/linguisticsdatacitation/austinprinciples/

The Tromsø Recommendations for Citation of Research Data In Linguistics. 2019. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00040

TROLLing – why linguists need it. Video, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEf0c0NT9_A

Why TROLLing is the thing to do for linguists. Blog post, 2019. https://www.inthefieldstories.net/why-trolling-is-the-thing-to-do-for-linguists/

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. ‘The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship’. Scientific Data 3: 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

Being part of DataverseNO (https://dataverse.no/), TROLLing (https://trolling.uit.no/) has recently been CoreTrustSeal-certified as a sustainable and trusted research data repository. Read more about the certification in this blog post.

We are very happy to offer a certified repository for linguists worldwide to archive and publish their data.

We are happy to see that the Research Council of Norway has granted funding for the CLARINO+ project, the Norwegian part of CLARIN ERIC and are looking forward to contribute to the development and maintenance of language infrastructure and resources in Norway.

We are happy that one of the TROLLing managers has been appointed by the Research Council of Norway as one of the two Norwegian members in the Management Committee of the COST Action CA18209 – European network for Web-centred linguistic data science. “It is important to contribute with our a long-tail-researchers’ perspective from TROLLing in networks like this COST action” – Philipp Conzett says.

Read this inspiring blog article about why linguists should use TROLLing:

https://www.inthefieldstories.net/why-trolling-is-the-thing-to-do-for-linguists/

LIBER’s Research Data Management Working Group has published two case studies showcasing research data management support provided by the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the University Library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. For more information, see here.

Being part of CLARIN/CLARINO, the Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) and DataverseNO are proud to participate in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC). SSHOC is funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. The overall objective of the SSHOC project is to realise the social sciences and humanities’ part of European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). As stated in the grant application, SSHOC aims at

realising the transition from the current landscape with disciplinary silos and separated e-infrastructure facilities into a cloud-based infrastructure where data are FAIR, and tools and training are available for scholars from those domains in the social science and humanities that have adopted a data-driven scientific approach and that have an interest in the innovation and integration of their methodological frameworks.

TROLLing is involved in Task 5.2 Hosting and sharing data repositories:

This task will offer a service on EOSC cloud platform, which will provide SSH institutions without a data repository service, such a facility for their designated communities. […] The new service is built upon the Dataverse software.

Being one of the first adopters of Dataverse in Europe, TROLLing has more than four years of experiences with the Dataverse application, and we are looking forward to develop the application further together with our partners in SSHOC!

Archive: https://trolling.uit.no

Blog/info: https://info.trolling.uit.no

The adoption of registered reports by linguistics journals will help to make linguistics more reproducible (e.g. ) and FAIR. We encourage all linguists to support this initiative!