Linguistic Landscape Bibliography

• The LL Bibliography is a curated collection of references to peer-reviewed publications (journal articles, edited collections, monographs, book chapters, reports, and dissertations) that are distinctly within the field of Linguistic Landscape and Semiotic Landscape studies. The LL Bib also contains references to early work that may not have used the term ‘Linguistic Landscape’ as well as some work from very closely related fields such as onomastics. 
• The LL Bib also contains references to all of the International LL Workshops since the inaugural event in 2008. 

• The LL Bib does not contain the full or complete texts of the works cited; however, every effort has been made to include an abstract [or the first paragraph of the publication when no abstract was present] as well as a link to the most stable DOI or online location that was available at the time the entry was created.

• Troyer, Robert A. (Year, Month Date accessed). Linguistic Landscape Bibliography. Zotero.  https://www.zotero.org/groups/216092/linguistic_landscape_bibliography/library

• The LL Bib does not contain the full texts of items. To search the full texts of a large subset of the LL Bib, use the LL Corpus.
• The LL Bib does not contain references to presentations or self-published (posted) items. Aside from citing the annual International LL Workshops, only peer-reviewed work or that which has been through an editorial process or supervised (theses and dissertations) are included. 
• The vast majority of items in the LL Bib are published in English; however, when scholars have emailed me directly with references to publications in other languages, I have included them. There is a wealth of LL studies published in other languages–unfortunately, it is not within the scope of the LL Bib budget to include all publications in all languages. 
• Journal articles are only entered AFTER they have been assigned a Volume, Issue, and Page numbers; thus, online early publications may not make their way into the LL Bib for several months or years. This is to avoid needing to revise entries when they are assigned print publication metadata.

For better or worse, the term “linguistic landscape” is used by both scholars and the general public to refer to not only studies of the visible language of public places but also to the collection of languages and varieties that are used in a geographical region and even sometimes to the discourses that are circulating among a language community. Thus, searches for the term ‘linguistic landscape’ among scholarly work and the internet in general will retrieve many irrelevant results. My goals for the LL Bibliography are:

• to separate the wheat from the chaff and provide LL scholars and students with sources that are relevant to them and easy to access via DOIs and stable URLs
• to level the playing field in terms of representation of voices in LL studies–-a keyword search in the Zotero LL Bib will find lesser known scholars and publications alongside those who are more frequently referenced
• to hasten scholarship in the field by creating a tool that makes researcher’s work faster and easier, both in terms of finding relevant resources and citing them quickly
• to document the exponential growth of this interdisciplinary endeavor to study the linguistic and semiotic practices that manifest in public places
• to make easily available to scholars the range of recent publications in LL studies. We tend to live in our bubble of topics and known scholarship with little time to see larger trends; scanning the list of titles and abstracts from the recent years, one quickly recognizes these themes

• The LL Bib contains the most often cited precursors to the 1997 coining of the term ‘Linguistic Landscape.’
• References to works published between 1997 and 2008 and a few after that do not always contain the phrase ‘Linguistic Landscape’ but are closely aligned to the gestalt from which the LL field developed. Occasionally I included a source because it was or may be of significant theoretical or methodological interest and helpfulness to LL scholars.
• From 1997 to 2021, every effort has been made to document published work that is within the LL sphere. Since 2021, it has been rare to find a relevant source before 2020 that is not contained in the LL Bib, but I make no claims to be absolutely comprehensive as that would be impossible.
• We are currently still working on 2022 and 2023 entries.
• Journal articles are only entered AFTER they have been assigned a Volume, Issue, and Page numbers; thus, online early publications may not make their way into the LL Bib for several months or years. This is to avoid needing to revise entries when they are assigned print publication metadata.
• If you know of or have a relevant publication that is not in the current LL Bib, please email me at the contact information above, and I will be happy to add it.

• There are two methods:
• The LL Bibliography is available for free online with no registration at https://www.zotero.org/groups/216092/linguistic_landscape_bibliography/library
• I highly encourage you to register on Zotero and request membership in the LL Bibliography Group. This will allow you to download the standalone Zotero desktop app and synch your account. The entire LL Bib will then be available you offline in a format that is easier to navigate, and you can search and sort the entries not only by Authors, Years, and Titles, but any field including the Abstracts. Being able to search the Abstracts is very valuable and not possible in the web-browser interface.  

• The LL Bibliography User Manual provides instructions for searching the web-browser interface and the standalone Zotero desktop all. 

• The LL Bibliography is hosted on Zotero–an academic research tool developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and initially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

• In 2009 while working my analysis of the virtual LL of Thai online newspapers, I realized that LL studies had increased at a fast pace since the publication of Durk Gorter’s (2006) edited collection. At that point, there were fewer than 80-100 publications that could be considered ‘LL studies’ including many that were part of the zeitgeist from which LL developed though they didn’t use the term ‘linguistic landscape’. Having created my own bibliography, I reached out to Durk Gorter, who shared with me items that I had overlooked, and I compiled all of these into a simple html page.

• From 2010 through 2013, I updated the LL Bib (as I call it) noting the exponential growth of publications in the nascent field. When the bibliography reached nearly 200 entries, I moved the project to Zotero, a free academic research tool for sharing references developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In the spring 2014 I presented a poster at AAAL titled “Historical and Emerging Trends in Linguistic Landscape Studies”–-at that time there were 260 entries in the LL Bib.

• Over the years, I have continued to update the LL Bib, relying on a host of auto-alerts, Durk’s additions, and many, many references sent to me by LL scholars across the globe. I have also increasingly relied on grant funds from my institution that allow me to hire and train a research assistant to help curate the LL Bib. While publishers have made it easier to generate citations and references for articles, it is still very time-consuming to sort through nearly daily alerts to new publications to find those that are relevant, to track our progress, which includes obtaining as many full texts of these publications as possible, and to create consistent and accurate Zotero entries that include searchable abstracts and links to publisher’s websites so that scholars have the most complete and useful information.

   

• While it has become increasingly easier to generate citations/references for publications by clicking a few buttons on publishers’ websites, these systems don’t always create standardized Zotero entries, even when using the appropriate format options. Thus, nearly every LL Bib entry needs manual editing for how the title, author’s/editor’s names, and other metadata is listed. While this is not extremely labor-intensive, it does require research assistant time and oversight/final checking before making a new entry available.
• Not all items in the LL Bib have abstracts readily available or in electronic format. Frequently for book chapters, we will use the brief description that editors provide in a volume’s introduction or the first paragraph of the chapter so that users can still do keyword searches that extend beyond the words of the title–we always indicate this in [brackets]. Sometimes we need to type abstracts, correct them from pdf conversions, and look up author or publisher-supplied keywords, and this takes time as well. 
• Every entry that refers to location-specific research (as opposed to theoretical/methodological work that does not contain any original LL data from a specific location) will be tagged in top-level folders for large geographic regions followed by subfolders for specific countries and occasionally subsubfolders for commonly studied regions or cities within a country. This is remains a human-reader task (not yet taken over by AI).
• Ever since a few years ago when academic journal publishers began releasing articles online months or even years before the articles are released in print, managing this continually updated bibliography became far more complicated. Early-release online articles have not been assigned Volume, Issue, and Page numbers. Thus, if we enter a reference to an online version as soon as it is released, eventually we will need to update the entry with the Vol, Iss, Pg. #s, and this would be an untenable cycle. For this reason entries are only added after an article has been issued in print. Note: Open Source materials, however, that will remain accessible via a stable url and unchanging metadata can be entered as soon as they are available.
• I rely on a host of auto alerts for new LL publications, but this certainly does not capture everything. We still need to manually check several journals that commonly publish LL studies and manually wade though the alerts to separate appropriate citations from ones that should not be included–as with point #3 above, this is a human-reader task. 
• The rapid increase in publications averaging around 125 entries per year for several years has made it difficult to keep up with all of the above. 

• In the free online web-browser Zotero interface (no registration needed), users can generate one or more citations/references to the LL Bib items and then copy and paste them–for the entire set all at once or any subset of selections or folders. You can also select as many items as you want and export them to one of several citation formats. 
• If you register on Zotero, become a member of the LL Bibliography Group, download the Zotero desktop app, and synch your account, you will have offline access to all of the metadata for every LL Bib entry.

• Given the work involved in updating the LL Bib, around 2021, I considered stopping at 2020; however, continual encouragement from users and a bit of institutional funding has persuaded me to continue the task.
• If you use the LL Bibliography, please let me know (see the Contacts page) so that I can make a case for additional funding.

• Creation of the LL Bib initially required no funding, however, since 2015 annual updates have been enabled by funding for undergraduate research assistants provided by Western Oregon University’s Community Internship Program and Faculty Development Funding for a Major Projects Research Grant as well as Faculty Development Funding for travel to Linguistic Landscape Workshops and institutional subscriptions to journals and purchases of individual publications.