Linguistic Annotation, the Reunification of Linguistics and Philology, and the Reinvention of the Humanities for a Global Age

Abstract

This paper addresses the critical role that treebanks in particular and linguistic annotation in general must play if the Humanities are to advance the intellectual life of society as a whole. During the twentieth century we saw a rise in specialization that not only separated the practices of philology and linguistics among different researchers but wholly separate (and sometimes conflicting) departments. The reunification of linguistics with philology is an essential element in the evolution of the Humanities and serves three critical functions. First, linguistic annotation, both machine generated and human curated, is an essential element both for large scale analysis of topics that cross more languages than any research can study, much less master, and for the intensive analysis of individual source and topics. Second, the associated changes in the scale of research demand that we draw upon more cultural and linguistic expertise than the established universities of North America and Europe can offer – we must enlist new collaborators in nations such as Egypt, India, and China, whom boundaries of language and of culture have often kept isolated. Third, even a global network of advanced scholars and library professionals is not sufficient to analyze sources in thousands of languages produced over thousands of years. We must develop student researchers and citizen scholars and a new participatory of scholarship. The potential consequences of these three changes are immense and each depends upon contributions by members of this workshop.