Our Mailing List - Time for Further Steps?

[Heiko]

Dear All,

hope you've had some quiet, relaxing Easter days - in case that that's
a celebration which is relevant to you :-)

Anyway, as we as the "co-chairs" of the mailing list agreed to some
time ago, Easter was a kind of deadline for getting back to discussing
the state of affairs of the list. Somehow we have to report that we
don't seem to have too many members yet, discussions or data base
creation is rather not flourishing etc (with the exception of Robert's
friendly offerings).

The question is therefore - what should we do? Create another call to
everybody for joining? Or should we just start ourselves to fill the
group with more content (e.g. upload pictures)? Are there any new
ideas about wishes? Or are there any other developments outside the
list?

Meanwhile, I am happy to report that my own project is going well - we
have extended our research to other towns than our local town of
Rezekne so far, next week-end we'll go to Lithuania for some research
- and the students who are involved love the experience!

Looking forward to hearing your opinions!

Best wishes

Heiko

[daveski]

Dear Heiko and all from the LL list,

Apologies for a long silence, and great to hear from you, Heiko, about
the research in Lithuania. I'd be interested to hear more about it.

Perhaps, in this way, starting discussion threads in which we can
share what's going on in our respective locations, questions that are
coming up, etc., would be something that more of us could do? I have a
feeling that with greater activity and lively discussion topics, the
question of expanding the group's membership may become easier to
address. Though another announcement to the larger group certainly
wouldn't hurt!

Thinking of other ways to make this group useful and interesting would
be good too. What do you think about sharing references, works you've
cited, find useful, or would like to read? We might upload
bibliographic information with very short (a few sentences?)
annotations, etc. It'd be easy to start by sharing reference lists
from our LL Tel Aviv workshop presentations...

Photo sharing would be great too, as perhaps would sharing powerpoint
presentations. A limitation of this Google site, though, is the 100MB
size limit, so if we wanted to share photos to any degree we'll have
to think about other solutions.

For my part, I'm going to be working over the next months with the
Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley in California to develop a
database for about 3000 sign pics taken in Korea and Japan, something
that could potentially be online, searchable and expandable such that
users could add their own photos. I'd love to talk about options and
issues related to this and, if anyone's interested, the feasibility of
working on multiple or combined online LL databases that could serve
the interests of the broader LL research and applied LL community
(like language teachers, for example).

I hope you're all well!

David

[Bernard Spolsky]

The shared data base is a fascinating idea. The intriguing problem
would be a taxonomy!
Bernard