How to Help

LingSync is OpenSource, so it becomes more awesome in direct proportion to the amount of time spent developing it. We need your help growing the community of people working with and on LingSync and enabling them to devote more time to it. Here are some things you can do.

Talk

• Like us at facebook.com/LingSyncApp or follow @LingSync on Twitter
• Tell your linguist friends about LingSync, particularly field linguists with experience/interest in programming languages
• Share our website, overview video (to be created), Facebook page or Twitter
• Do a presentation at your university or research group about LingSync. We have slides already that you can use as-is or modify: Why LingSync
• Add a “we use LingSync” link to your personal or project webpage or blog

Collaborate

LingSync is a very modular app: we have done our best to make contributing skills and/or know how actually save you time, rather than taking time away from your research. One of the best ways for it to save you time preparing your data for analysis, is by customizing it to your data or your existing workflow. Because it's OpenSource, and it was designed by researchers in Prosody, Morphology and Semantics we have designed it to play nicely with all our favorite tools (Praat, Elan, FLEx, R, as well as some computational linguistics tools which are less known).

• Notice a bug or something confusing about the interface? Let us know
• Think of something that you wish LingSync did? Tell us
• Do you have field linguistics data in any structured format that we could use as training data for our auto-glosser or make publicly accessible on the web as a demo corpus? Send it to us
• Are you a linguist who already has some programming experience? We want to hear from you
• Are you a linguist with other skills like graphic design or video production/editing? We also want to hear from you
• Do you already have a script, program, or app that you use for some type of linguistic work or analysis, but it doesn’t have a graphical interface or you want to make it available for more users? We’d love to integrate it into LingSync. Talk to us

Fund

• Fund a/your student as a research assistant to work on improving a part of LingSync that would be useful to you
  • We can also try to pair you with an interested student in Montreal, or a student who you already know can work remotely at your own university
  • Students: contact us or try to persuade your profs to pay you to join the development of LingSync!
  • We will videochat with them weekly and train them to use Javascript, HTML5, Github, and other project management and data management tools
  • Student gains valuable technical skills, the project gains new features or makes existing features more robust
  • No programming experience necessary! -- If you can make a syntax tree, we can teach you how to code
• Hire a programmer to add a new feature to LingSync
  • There are some features or modules that we’d like to implement, but we are waiting to have the time or funds
  • The features/modules mostly involve using existing OpenSource software to make it easier to analyize and/or share your data with the language community you are working with, or with your collaborators
  • If one of these is relevant to your work, you can help us fund it to make it happen
  • Some examples:
    • Language-learning app that integrates with corpus
    • Search for phonological features in context
    • Rough transciption of audio
    • Automatic import/split of audio into utterances
    • Ability to export corpus as wiki-style dictionary
    • Improved auto-glosser
    • Ability to find relevant data from the internet, and add it to your corpus
  • Or, talk to us about your needs and we can come up with other ideas for modules
• Fund a previous intern to provide you with technical support to a field methods class or team project using LingSync
  • Training videos and documentation for your users
  • They can help you set up your team corpus and server
  • Tech support via email and videochat

If you need documentation on the goals, methodology etc of your data management processes, we can provide documentation for you which you can copy-paste into your documentation for your funding agency or community organization: https://github.com/OpenSourceFieldlinguistics/FieldDB/blob/master/docs/WhitePaper.pdf