News From The Editor

June 10, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS --- Tibetan Corpus Linguistics and NLP

Himalayan Linguistics solicits submissions to a special issue on Tibetan
Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing to be published in 2016.
Possible topics include, OCR, the development of tag sets, statistical or
rule driven segmenters or part-of-speech taggers, chunking, syntactic
parsing, machine aided translation, descriptive linguistic insights gained
from corpus research, verb subcategorization, etc. All submissions will be
subject to double blind peer-review. Papers building on previous
non-anglophone research are particularly encouraged. As befits the broad
focus of the journal, authors are encouraged to write with an audience of
linguistics in mind who may not be familiar with NLP. In keeping with this
goal, articles of any length will be accepted and authors are encouraged to
take more space than is often possible in NLP or computationally focussed
journals.

The deadline for this call is 15 January 2016.

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April 29, 2015

Dear Himalayan Linguistics Community:

The earthquake that shook Nepal, killed thousands, and injured, displaced
and wounded the spirits of many more thousands in-country and abroad, was
truly devastating news to us all. At this time, I can report (with
considerable relief) that the professors and scholars that make up our
community have all been reported as safe and accounted for in some way or
another. While I continue to follow the emerging reports as closely as
possible, if any members of this community have HL-relevant updates to
report, please feel free to contact me (khildeb@siue.edu) and I will share
that information.

Best wishes to all in this difficult time,

Kristine A. Hildebrandt
editor, Himalayan Linguistics , April 29 2015

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December 15, 2014

Dear Community of Scholars:

As editor of Himalayan Linguistics , the day has finally come when I am able to warmly welcome you to our new digital home, hosted by the University of California's eScholarship platform. eScholarship provides Open-Access scholarly publishing services, and will allow our journal to continue to grow and flourish into the future. We welcome you by way of issue 13.2 (2014), with four articles and one book review.

In many ways, Himalayan Linguistics will remain the same, high-quality venue that it has always been since its launch by Carol Genetti, Tej Ratna Kansakar and Michael Noonan in 2004. It will remain an online peer-reviewed journal specializing in languages of the Himalayan region. You will still be able to access articles, book reviews, book notices and field reports, and also grammars, dictionaries, and text collections as free-standing publications Also, as always, Himalayan Linguistics will remain free, with no subscription fee. Another thing that will remain the same about Himalayan Linguistics is its semi-annual publication (June and December). And, as begun in 2013, each issue of Himalayan Linguistics will continue to be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) License. And, because Himalayan Linguistics is now housed with eScholarship, the contributions will enjoy more comprehensive indexing in library databases worldwide. As an additional benefit, because Himalayan Linguistics will now be permanently archived as part of the University of California digital library, we will have the security of long-term digital housing and storage.

But you will notice a few new things about Himalayan Linguistics , beginning with this issue 13.2. First, you may use the "Select Issue" bar at the top of the screen to scroll through current and back issues. Second, because all book reviews published before 2008 (before Himalayan Linguistics changed to its current semi-annual publication schedule in 2010) have issue numbers that are potentially in conflict with later issues, they have been assembled into a special issue: 1:2. Third, you may notice that the "Archive & Field Reports" section is accessible via a link on the side box of the home screen. Fourth, periodic messages and updates from the editor may be found at the "News from the Editor" link.

Perhaps the biggest change to Himalayan Linguistics will be the way in which new contributions are submitted for review and editing. All authors are requested to submit their articles or other contributions by using the "Submit Article to this Journal" button on the left side of the screen. There, you will be able to create a personal account and provide your author (and co-author) and contact information. The editorial board will assign peer-reviewers and manage the revision and formatting process entirely through this portal. This will eliminate previous problems with lost emails, font and formatting issues, and file upload/download glitches, for example.

As a final note, I wish to thank the authors of this current issue for working patiently with us as we prepared this "inaugural" issue 13.2 on the eScholarship platform. We will continue to make the submission, peer-review, and revision/formatting/proofs process as simple and user-friendly as possible.

On behalf of the editorial board, I invite you to explore Himalayan Linguistics in its new home, and to consider submitting to the journal. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly (khildeb@siue.edu).

Kristine A. Hildebrandt
editor, Himalayan Linguistics , 2014