The phenomenon of citizen science is still a new, unknown and too little attention-getting topic in Lithuania. A particularly strong contrast emerges when trying to compare this phenomenon with citizen science projects developed in Western Europe, which long ago crossed the boundaries of local interest and became the targets of national strategies. Scientists from Vytautas the Great University spoke about this and many other issues of citizen science in recently published interviews.
Vytautas Magnus University Library continues its series of interviews with researchers working in the field of citizen science as part of the Erasmus+ project “University libraries strengthening the academia-society connection through citizen science in the Baltics (LibOCS)”, and today we interview Professor Rūta Petrauskaitė from the Faculty of Humanities at the Vytautas Magnus University (VMU).
The researcher specializes in semantics and pragmatics, linguistics of texts, stable word combinations and everyday language metaphors. Special attention is paid to lexicology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, problems of text and textual linguistics. R. Petrauskaitė heads the Digital Resources and Interdisciplinary Research Institute of VMU, established in the spring of 2022. She is also the head of VMU science cluster “Text and voice digital research, development and application of resources and technologies”. The former long-time head of the VMU Computational Linguistics Center is currently actively involved in international research projects. Together with a large group of colleagues, she runs the project “Promotion of cooperation between foreign Baltic centers and Lithuanian research and study institutions” and is a researcher of the “Transform 4 European Research and Innovation” (T4ERI) project of the European University Alliance approved by the European Commission. She is also involved in other project activities, is a member of the CLARIN-LT national consortium, participates in various scientific events, gives lectures. Among other things, R. Petrauskaitė is the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Darbai ir Dienos” and a member of the editorial board of the journals “International Journal of Corpus Linguistics” and “Archyvum Lituanicum”.
Rūta Petrauskaitė thinks that communication of science, its popularization is the first step to attract other citizens, and once they are attracted, they cannot be let go, because the opinion of people is always important. Non-professionals often point out important points that are overlooked by scientists.
Read the full interview with Rūta Petrauskaitė as (In Lithuanian) here.
