Academic Collaborations

There are various reasons that language workers might turn to external academic (university) partnerships. Some examples are:

• Universities may have people or programs who have a good track record of doing the kind of work you want to do
• Universities have resources that could benefit your work
• You may already have connections with trusted individuals from university language or linguistic departments
• External academic institutions already understand the several Rs and the CARE principles, and who have proven themselves to be trustworthy collaborators
• There can be biases in many grant application and review systems that advantage projects with university partners such as requiring the principal investigator to have a terminal degree in the field (PhD); or requiring database or archival systems that meet certain standards (refer to Module 2) as examples

If you don’t know of anyone to reach out to, but think your project might benefit from an external academic partnership, it would be useful to ask other language workers in your network whether they might have suggestions or experiences to share – good or bad. You might know of or learn about a project that is successful and seems to have been done in a way that you would be comfortable with, and reach out to the scholar(s) involved in that project. One often overlooked source of support among scholarly partners are library and archive departments. Archivists will have good training in many of the core principles of data management, and can be very helpful partners in language work.

Language work with any external partner will require review and approval from at least your own community Institutional Research Board, if you have one, and that of the collaborating institution. Involving personnel from your own IRB and Human Subjects Protections programs, and any other relevant offices, from the earliest possible stage can be very important. These processes can be long, complicated and frustrating – so it’s best to include them from the first stages of planning.

And don’t be afraid to set boundaries and be clear from the beginning about how much of the project leadership and decision-making you want to share (if any), and about your policies around data sharing, storage, use and publication.