Peer Review History
Original SubmissionDecember 21, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-40182Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation – a case study of UralicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rantanen, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Although both reviewers judge the revisions needed to be minor they address different aspects, so the combined amount of suggested revisions would be more than minor. Both reviewers point to some cases where a particular practice might be improved or where a suggestion is not perceived as being optimal. No doubt, there is a room for different opinions about what is a best practice, so more discussion of alternative could be added. And sometimes there is still room for improvement in your own practice--it may actually strengthen the paper to admit for this possibility where relevant. Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 03 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful: USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/ Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/ USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/# Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The data and practice behind this paper are extensively and quite well-described but lacks the most important part, namely what they consider the "language area" (that is to be mapped). After noting this problem (pp 19-20) they offer no definition nor or declaration of how they have dealt with it for the data at hand, except to say they've consulted experts. Unfortunately the paper also lacks any detail who is to be considered an expert, with what instructions they have consulted the experts and how they weed out inconsistencies across experts. These are relevant questions. Presumably the experts are the same kind of people who write papers about the same languages, and as the authors duly note, they have "different opinions" and "vary notably". For example, for Nganasan the maps show a continuous area including the area to the coast east of Lake Taimyr and north of Nordvik island with sources "Dolgix 1963, Popov 1948, Brykina & Gusev 2015, Wagner-Nagy 2018:3". None of these sources sanction this chunk as Nganasan settled. In particular, the extremely detailed maps by Dolgix (temporally differentiated) and Popov (summer-winter differentiated) --- based on their own extensive fieldwork --- stop just east of lake Tajmyr, not including the NE area up to the coast. You could of course say that area might have been hunting grounds and certainly no other ethnic group lay claim to it, but then the entire northern Tajmyr could just as well be mapped as Nganasan as hunting grounds (Golovnev 1999 says this explicitly). Also, following Popov, the settlements were always along drainages, and the interior areas hunting grounds, but the maps show continuous areas but not including *all* hunting grounds. What is the actual intent? Another example is South Saami whose northen dialect on the map includes Södra Tärna with the sources "Hasselbrink 1981–1985, Rydving 2008: 360–361, Rydving 2016, Maja Lisa Kappfjell & Jussi Ylikoski (p.c.)" but Rydving is explicitly arguing for South Tärna to be counted as Ume Saami. What was the reasoning here and what informaed was asked of or provided by Ylikoski? The bottom line is, there are two choices: (i) Either the paper stays without a definition of the intended areas to map and/or a methodology for using the experts, but then the authors have not defined a "practice", let alone a "best practice", and the title should be changed accordingly, or (ii) such a "best practice" is defined and included in a revision. This is the only important point, everything else is essentially fine and the resource as such is excellent. Non-important issues: * Rephrase: "In our case, it was obvious that different opinions about the language distributions vary notably between the different sources by language." * "but the workflow is applicable to other language families or geographical areas as well" There are no experts for every language available for most families and areas so this workflow is not applicable in the same form for others. * It would be nice of more detail (or a reference) were given on how to best digitize printed maps * Imperatorskoe Russkoe Geograficheskoe, Obshchestvo -> remove comma * Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva -> why genitive? * Some Russian sources are in Roman, some in Russian majuscule and some in Russian minuscule. Harmonize. Golovnev, Andrei V. (1999) The Nia (Nganasan). In Richard B. Lee & Richard Daly (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, 166-169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reviewer #2: The idea of publishing a best practice example of handling spatio-linguistic data is quite good and the relevance of this publication should not be underestimated. Good practice guidelines for data handling is available in all natural sciences and is also available in some disciplines of the humanities. A general good practice approach should be part of the digital humanities but also requires specific components for each topic. This article combines general aspects of handling geospatial data and specific aspects of linguistics. The current review focusses on the first part. Though, the workflow employs rather general steps, it can be helpful for considering all steps and after all, too narrow standards are rather preventing the concept from being applied. In particular pointing at the importance of open licences (cc) and open platforms (zenodo) is an important consideration for up to date research. Another important point is to acknowledge certain redundancies such as offering the geospatial data as well as the ready made maps in order to allow benefits for different target groups. The part on geospatial data can be further improved. - It seems clear why polygons should be used, but why are four point data sets part of the database? It seems that this fact destroys the consistency of the database. - I understand why WGS84 is used but for mapping and geospatial analysis projected coordinate systems are usually preferred. It would be helpful to explain the decision. - The decision for shape files is not understandable at all. It is true that shape files are still wide spread but they are based on an completely outdated technology. A new god practice guideline and a new workflow should be based on up to date and sustainable technology. For small data as in this case, a text and WKT or EWKT based format such as csv would have the benefit of being easily to integrate in full reproducible research workflows. Further more, this formats are as software-independent as possible. For larger data spatialite databases and derivates such as geopackage would be a good choice. It would be helpful to discuss this point and to refer to newer developments in geography and geospatial technology. - An example of overlapping data would be helpful and a more detailed explanation of how to combine data and handle the overlapping would be appreciated. Another possible improvement could address the handling of chronological information. Perhaps, a more general approach would make sense. Categories such as "traditional" might make sense in a specific case but are rather confusing and imprecise in general. Examples of how to handle temporal data are known from temporal data bases and from archaeology. ********** 6. 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Revision 1 |
Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation – a case study of Uralic PONE-D-21-40182R1 Dear Dr. Rantanen, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Søren Wichmann, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed ********** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ********** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Comments have been adequately addressed............................................................. Reviewer #2: Many thanks for the revised version. All comments have been addressed and all issues are solved. ********** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: Yes: Harald Hammarström Reviewer #2: Yes: Oliver Nakoinz |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-21-40182R1 Best practices for spatial language data harmonization, sharing and map creation – a case study of Uralic Dear Dr. Rantanen: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Søren Wichmann Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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