Language variation studies and computational humanities

The volume we are introducing here contains a selection of the papers presented at a special track on computational techniques for studying language variation held at The Thirteenth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology in Leeds on 4–5 August 2008. We are grateful to the conference organisers, Nigel Armstrong, Joan Beal, Fiona Douglas, Barry Heselwood, Susan Lacey, Ann Thompson, and Clive Upton for their cooperation in our organisation of the event. We likewise owe thanks to the referees of the present volume, who we are pleased to acknowledge explicitly: Agnes de Bie, Roberto Bolognesi, David Britain, Cynthia Clopper, Ken Decker, Anders Eriksson, Hans Goebl, Stefan Grondelaers, Carlos Gussenhoven, Nynke de Haas, Frans Hinskens, Angela Kluge, Gitte Kristiansen, Alexandra Lenz, Maarten Mous, Hermann Niebaum, Lisa Lena Opas-Hänninen, Petya Osenova, John Paolillo, Louis Pols, Helge Sandøy, Bob Shackleton, Felix Schaeffler, Marco Spruit, Rint Sybesma, Nathan Vaillette, Gunther de Vogelaer, and Esteve Valls. The conference track consisted of 24 papers and posters, including a keynote address by Vincent van Heuven on phonetic techniques for studying variation and comprehensibility. Fourteen contributions were selected for publication in this special issue of the International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing, including van Heuven’s. In addition the conference track featured a panel session reflecting on the introduction of computational techniques to the study of language variation and more generally, on computing and the humanities. We have prepared a report on the panel session for publication here as well. In the remainder of this article we sketch variationist linguistics as a subfield within the discipline of linguistics and relate how we see the path that led to computational studies occupying a modest place in this branch of linguistics. Our intention is that the present introduction provides a context within which the more specialised contributions can be better appreciated. More importantly for those especially interested in humanities computing, we sketch the contributions of this volume collectively as an example of what we might refer to as an engaged humanities computing, which we intend as a contribution to the ongoing debate about how computational work can best be integrated into the humanities disciplines (Nerbonne, 2005; McCarty, 2005). We shall elaborate on this further below, but we mean in particular that it has been the strategy of computationalists working in language variation that they primarily address existing questions from this sub-discipline, that they attempt to solve existing analytical problems, that they compare their results to those of non-computational scholars, and that they examine their methods and results critically from the perspective of the sub-discipline. The goal is to have computational techniques accepted into the toolbox that the sub-discipline normally recommends