Year in review: 2021

Though 2021 was a difficult year for many, it was another extremely productive one for IDEA. Some highlights, congratulations, and thanks:

• Site visitors continue to grow. The archive saw roughly 3 million hits from about 1 million visitors.
• We published 53 new samples, bringing the archive close to 1,700.
• Welcome Uruguay and Namibia into our family of nations. We also added subjects from regions that had been previously underrepresented, mostly notably Siberia, thanks to the efforts of Ivan Masterov.
• Congratulations to Kris Danford on achieving the status of senior editor, with more than 30 excellent submissions.
• Because of the efforts of IDEA Executive Editor Cameron Meier, most IDEA pages have been tweaked to make them easier to find online and more conducive to sharing on social media. We also made improvements to our Global Map.
• Welcome new associate editor Betty Moulton, whose debut submissions were five fine samples from Kenya.
• Congratulations and thanks to the following editors for their submissions this year: Ben Corbett, Kris Danford, Aldrin Fauni-Tanos, Tshari King, Ivan Masterov, Betty Moulton, and Sarah Nichols.
• Thanks to all of our other contributors, too. In fact, 2021 saw almost as many submissions from non-editors (contributors and self-submitters) as submissions from editors.
• We continued to add subjects from underrepresented countries, regions, ethnicities, and races. We particularly applaud Ben’s Corbett’s magnificent initiative, The Arkansas Accent Project, which strives to make a special study of the dialects of his adopted state. Ben will be making sure all demographics are covered under the grant he received from the University of Arkansas, where he is a professor. We also owe a big thank-you to new IDEA contributor Jacqueline Springfield, whose four subjects from Tennessee and Georgia helped improve our representation of Black subjects from the Southern United States. We hope all of IDEA’s editors and contributors will be inspired to follow Ben and Jacqueline’s example, and we encourage site visitors whose location, culture, or ethnicity is underrepresented to submit recordings of yourself! (See our Wish List to discover our highest priorities.)
• Our fall fund drive prompted generous donations from several first-time donors. Our deepest thanks to all who gave. However, as is typical of such drives, the percentage of users making a contribution was very low: just 0.000018%. It’s never too late, of course, to support IDEA, the free research resource you have come to value. The Support IDEA button is a permanent fixture on the site.

Keep up the great work, everyone. Happy New Year!