LingStoryCorps is an oral history project modeled on the national Story Corps initiative (https://storycorps.org/), and it aims to collect brief narratives (on the order of 15 – 20 minutes) from a variety of linguists reflecting on their life in linguistics. The lead idea behind this effort was to provide a snapshot in the years around the centennial of the Linguistic Society of America (2024) of who is “doing” (i.e., involved in) linguistics in America and in the world at large. To that end, we have tried to interview as wide a range of linguists as possible — extending from undergraduates in their first linguistics classes, to linguistics majors (concentrators), to beginning and advanced graduate students, to postdoctoral researchers and other younger scholars, to all faculty ranks, including retirees, and to linguists outside of academia.
The recordings can be accessed via this link: https://u.osu.edu/lingstorycorps/sound-file-access/, the page on this site entitled “Sound File Access” (see site Table of Contents immediately to the left of this post).
This project was my brainchild some years ago but I have been helped enormously by various colleagues and students (see the “Personnel” page for a list of all those who have been involved and who have assisted in this effort in one way or another).
To date we have collected some 180 recordings of these brief interviews, with the first being done at the LSA Institute at University of California, Davis, in the summer of 2019 and the next recordings being done at the LSA Annual Meeting in January 2020. The Covid pandemic cut into our ability to do more interviews at large events, but several were done via Zoom during the lockdown and beyond, by myself and others, and we also did some at the 2022 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, and at the 2023 Annual Meeting in Denver. In addition, during my travels as the pandemic eased somewhat, I took advantage of being together with various linguists at conferences and other encounters to do more recorded interviews, and Zoom has made it possible to do many on an ad hoc basis.
The interviewees have mainly been self-selecting; that is, for the most part, the roster of interviewees consists of whoever responded to a general call at each of the various events listed above and volunteered to be recorded and interviewed as part of this project. In some instances, though, they are “friends of friends”, i.e. friends of volunteers who thought a friend of theirs might be interested in participating. Moreover, in some cases, I sought out specific people to interview, by way of trying to augment the roster with interviewees who I thought might be of particular general interest to other linguists.
Please note that this is an oral history project and that the recordings have been collected with that motivation in mind. This means that the interviews cannot be used for basic or applied linguistic research unrelated to the history of the field; thus, they cannot be used as data for phonetics research or variation or discourse analysis or the like. Please respect this injunction.
These recordings are publicly available (please visit the “Sound File Access” page on this site) and our aim is to keep on collecting more, as is feasible, in the years to come.
Thank you for your interest in this project; please tell your friends, colleagues, and students about this, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments on this project or if you would like to be interviewed (it’s painless — even fun — and you become part of the living history of the field!).
Brian D. Joseph (joseph.1@osu.edu)
Founder, LingStoryCorps
Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus
The Ohio State University