Members of the Center for Language and Brain Maria Khudyakova, Ekaterina Stupina and Nina Zdorova participate in the workshop Moving Research Online

The pandemic in 2020 has revealed a necessity in conducting research online, as due to the lockdown and travel limitations, laboratories are closed, and people work from home only. In order to keep pace with the current challenges and trends, experimental linguistics also needs to develop and apply online tools that serve its purposes.

There are several advantages of conducting experiments online. They include an access to the more diverse population groups, higher speed of collecting data, convenience for both participant and researcher. However, an online experiment implies some major differences from a lab experiment and this requires a special training. On the one hand, a researcher has to be able to encode their experiment using html, css, JavaScript and incorporating their experiments in the special software and websites. On the other hand, a researcher also has to take into consideration the new format of the experiment, and thus to plan more thoroughly or even newly experiment instruction, design, forms of consent, data storage etc. 

The workshop Moving Research Online contains lectures and questions-and-answers session covering all the issues mentioned above, and is scheduled for a month, from June, 30 till July, 30. The organizers of the workshop and its presenters are researchers from Boston College, University College London, Cambridge University, and Vassar College.