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In the last decade, we have seen a number of studies come to life in which the collection of data for linguistic research has not followed a traditional path of holding in-person interviews or experiments, or using surveys for eliciting judgements, but instead have made use of smartphone technology and applications for collecting data. The current collection is the first to include papers with reflections from the linguistics community about the use of smartphone technology for linguistic research. The scope of the projects presented in this collection is a broad one. They have the mode of data collection, i.e. through a phone, in common, but all present different opportunities and challenges. The studies discussed in this introduction use smartphones to investigate language variation and change, clinical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and the sociology of language. Our hope is that this issue will provide ideas and inspiration, as well as access to readily usable tools, to keep researchers working, in a remote fashion, towards increasing our understanding the human competence of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smartphone apps are ubiquitous: in 2018 in Germany alone, 79% of the population owned a smartphone. Virtually everyone in this cohort always carries with them a recording device and a notepad (i.e., a screen), two essential tools that linguists typically use in the field. In the present contribution we discuss how linguists can harness this ubiquity of linguistic tools in the population to capture language variation and change, illustrated through apps that were developed for German-speaking Europe. We present four apps (Dialäkt Äpp, Voice Äpp, Grüezi Moin Servus, and Deutschklang) that were developed to (a) engage with the public and (b) to collect linguistic data. We discuss opportunities (e.g., the multimodality of said devices), as well as challenges (e.g., maintenance, updating and the costs involved therein). Finally, we present new findings that have emerged from working with this new paradigm and speculate about future directions and developments in using smartphone apps to collect linguistic data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic data collection typically involves conducting interviews with participants in close proximity. The safety precautions related to the COVID-19 pandemic brought such data collection to an abrupt halt: Social distancing forced linguistic fieldwork into involuntary hibernation in many parts of the world. Such hardship, however, can inspire innovation. In this contribution, we present an approach that – we believe – enables a reliable switch from in-person, face-to-face interviews to virtual, online data collection. In this approach, participants remain at home and navigate a smartphone application, enabling high-quality audio recordings and multisensory presentation of linguistic material, while they are being supervised via videoconferencing (Zoom 2020https://zoom.us/ (accessed 11 August 2020)). The smartphone app and the infrastructure presented are open source, accessible, and adaptable to researchers' specific needs. To explore whether participants' experiences of in-person data collection are different from participation in a virtual setting, we conducted a study with 36 participants. Overall, findings revealed a substantial degree of overlap in interview experience, setting a methodological baseline for future work. We end this contribution by discussing the benefits and pitfalls of this new approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]