A few years ago when I was still at CSIRO, I was contacted by Linda Barwick from PARADISEC to research into the use of Annodex for linguists. The main problem was that ethnographic researchers are publishing research outcomes on paper or even HTML, which are essentially discussions about small sections of field recordings of exotic languages – however, they had no means to do citations of these sections through hyperlinks or any other simple interactive means. In the time of online media, that should be a trivial task, right? But it wasn’t. Annodex and the timed URIs provided the right basis for a solution.

Fast forward lots of months of work in the EthnoER project and you get a solution for ethnographic researchers which is unique and completely based on open formats and open source software. Check out Linda’s blog entry of today!

Congratulations to everybody who has put all that effort into the project – Nick Thieberger, Linda Barwick, Shane Stephens, Stuart Hungerford, Jonathan McCabe, and all the others whom I forgot. EthnoER and Annodex might have changed the way in which linguistic research online can be published – not a small feat at all!