Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the complex and fluid life of Slovenian linguistic data reflecting local and global events through the users of the Slovenian language. It focuses on how linguistic data is lived by a group of linguists who are cocreating the digital platform Fran.

Paper long abstract:

During the pandemic a group of linguists tried to make sense of this phenomenon through gathering and combining linguistic data from the most relevant new and previously published dictionary entries, and language consultancy responses related to Covid-19, published as the 7.1 special version of Fran (a web portal representing the combined work of the Fran Ramovš Institute for Slovenian Language). Outside of Fran, linguistic data simultaneously exists in different forms and relations amongst the general public, expert users, language corpuses, linguists and their hard drives, backups on data servers, paper cards in archives, written texts and audio-visual contents.

How does the digital augmentation of linguistic data change the relations to the before mentioned users, mediums and environments? Can the digitalization of linguistic data be understood in terms of Haraway's (2016) cyborg, as an extended social tissue that connects human and nonhuman entities through their partial connections? Can partial connections (Strathern, 2004) illuminate the different spatial and environmental habitats and states of linguistic data? Can we apply the concept of correspondences (Ingold, 2021) to how linguistic data is lived by us, the users? Does this data exist as an otherness? And how does it inhabit linguists who translate the practices of language users into representations of formalized Slovenian language?

Finally, the pandemic not only shifted the focus of linguists’ work, it also shifted the way they worked. It affected their workflow; the immediacy of their social contact which affects how they debate and finally define linguistic data before publication.