ABSTRACT
The general practice in sociolinguistics, and it is not atypical of work in other social sciences, has been to collect data for our own studies and then keep the data private, or in other social sciences even destroy the data, in order to preserve the confidentiality of research subjects. Indeed, ethics boards—such as, in the United States, institutional review boards (IRBs)—have set policies for the protection of human subjects that encourage the destruction of social data like ours, since audio or video recordings of interviews cannot be guaranteed to protect the privacy of the subject. The web is really the only choice for wide distribution of our data. It reaches both the general and the specialist audiences. Storage of data for distribution online also helps with maintenance of archives, because it is much easier to keep copies of digital files on disk than to preserve analog media like tape or physical digital media such as tape or CDs.
