hey Bureaucracy Folks!
I'm never in here, but something has come up that I want to Propose to the Buffistas.
As many of you know, I work for mumble-mumble Dictionary, and I am also involved with an organization that is collecting examples of modern American speech and writing for dictionary editors, people who write ESL textbooks, computational and corpus linguists, etc., to compile a corpus for research purposes.
They are looking for web data. I instantly thought about the Buffistas, because we are overwhelmingly American (I won't mention Nilly, Angus, Moonlit, the Nova Scotians, Am Chau et al.), we are highly literate, and our discussions touch on a great many topics (unlike many other discussion boards), and most importantly, the Buffistas OWN Buffistaland, which means that, unlike with some other sites like WX, we didn't give away the store to what we've written.
The data can be anonymized to remove usernames, and the entire board would not be included. They would take, at most, several hundred thousand words at random. (The entire corpus is going to be 200 million words, just to let you know scale.)
I said I would ask if the Buffista discussions (although I didn't actually say "Buffista") could be corporized. I am asking here, but I think that this is something that the Buffistas should vote on.
Plusses: Our writing would influence the creation of dictionaries and teaching materials for certainly at least the next ten years, and realistically for the next forty or more years. We would really be helping a wonderful non-profit scholarly endeavor. It would also push the word 'foamy.'
Cons: Although the selection of words would be random and not connected to user names, it is stuff that would be seen by perhaps as many as a thousand researchers over the next decade. The site might have to be identified by URL in the documentation of corpus sources (I'm not sure). The Buffista Stompies would have to sign a release allowing the corpus researchers to use the data under a restricted license (which says that only people who agree to use the data for scholarly purposes can see it, no commercial exploitation, and that researchers must follow certain ethical rules).
I am happy to answer any questions, either here (I will try to check this thread daily) or by profile email. I promise no salesperson will call. :-)