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avatar for Matt Menzenski

Matt Menzenski

Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Kansas
Masters Student
Lawrence, KS
I’m a second-year graduate student in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Kansas. I’ve been interested in Open movements in one form or another since I joined a Linux club as an undergraduate, but since beginning graduate school I’ve started participating more actively in the Open Access movements. I’m currently serving as one of two graduate student members on the Open Access Advisory Board at the University of Kansas. KU is at the forefront of the Open Access movement in many ways and I’m proud to have the chance to contribute to that discussion.

Open Access is important to me on a personal level as well. My own research interests center around corpus linguistics, and that requires access to linguistic corpora (large, curated bodies of text and language data). Many corpora are ‘open’ in a sense, since they’re online and publicly searchable, but they’re too frequently lacking in ‘access’. Downloading data, or exporting it into a more usable format, is too frequently prohibited or severely restricted. Linguistics as a field benefits from free and open access to lots of language data—this is why corpora are constructed in the first place. We should work towards opening up access to this data.

Look me up at OpenCon if you’re working on a project that needs a Python programmer, a Russian translator, or anything else, really. I’ve started to release a few little corpus linguistics tools and widgets under a CC-BY license, but I’m interested in working on something larger.

Licensed CC-BY-4.0