Language Archives

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) provides a comprehensive infrastructure that has allowed our community to index and discover language resources over the past 20 years. However, OLAC infrastructure has fallen behind as the digital libraries community has continued to evolve. New investment is required in order to move OLAC into the digital libraries mainstream. This paper reports on the first 20 years of OLAC and on an agenda leading to a more sustainable future for open language archiving.

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important information that could be used as both data and metadata. We propose the term contextual clips for incidentally-collected recordings which have been deprioritized in some way. Contextual clips may be more naturalistic and offer an effective way to supplement written metadata and other contextual information. Our experience investigating humor also revealed that collaboration as a process can serve as a means to test a corpus. Working across disciplines helped identify future user needs, such as missing contextual information that may not be obvious to a researcher familiar with the corpus. Collaborative research may thus be an elegant solution to some of the known issues in mobilizing corpora. We encourage other researchers who manage corpora to identify contextual clips they may have, evaluate why the files were deprioritized originally, and to consult with communities on how to manage individual files.

This paper aims to provide a practical guide to those who have the opportunity to conduct sociolinguistic field research in Micronesia, focusing on the hands-on, nitty-gritty experiences of actual data collection rather than theoretical aspects. Informed by my fieldwork experiences as a novice researcher in the 1990s, it discusses 2 main issues: how to gain access to the community and how to find potential informants. It also provides some useful tips for dos and don'ts for field research in Micronesia.

The Archival / Preservation Education SIG panel engages with interconnected external pressures and curricular goals in the archival classroom. Four moderated presentations focus on innovative classroom pedagogy, including modeling and visualizing collection data, the digital and physical interconnectedness of digitization activities in pre-professional training, and practical experience and deliverables with unique archival collections; presenters bring perspectives from three states and two countries. "Inclusive Collection Visualization and Arrangement" by Sarah Buchanan discusses the data practice of visualization as a creative response to archival arrangement and metrics for aggregating collection attributes. "Paradigm Shift in LIS Education from Digital Revolution to a Cyber-Physical System" by Najim Babalola examines how emerging and immersive information and communication technologies (ICT) such as digitization are changing service deliveries, with a view to preparing prospective professionals in Nigeria with knowledge and critical skills. "Closing Doors Opens Others: Exploring Pedagogical Opportunities through Temporary Custody of Records" by Katherine Wisser, Adam Kriesberg, and Sarah Pratt reviews how faculty, archives staff, and students across levels are processing and learning with the American Textile History Museum records, before eventual transfer to UMass Lowell. "Education to Support Language Data Archives and Preservation: Experiential Learning and Community Collaboration in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Course at University of North Texas" shares lessons learned in teaching a multi-modal, team-based, and experiential course with South Asian language materials and UNT Digital Collections.

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue that whilst open access may be indicative of good scientific practices, such criteria cannot be extrapolated to documentary linguistics. I start by explaining the differences between those concepts. Then I discuss the dialectic tension in which language depositors frequently find themselves. On the one hand, archives and grant agencies ask them to archive as much as possible with unrestricted access while also gathering a corpus as "naturalistic" and diverse as possible in terms of content, genres, speakers, and so forth. On the other hand, depositors are expected to behave ethically, which involves restricting access to certain materials. I move on to lesser-discussed cases illustrating how ethical decisions concerning accessibility are strongly bound to the needs and situations of the specific communities at a specific time. I finish by proposing new evaluation criteria, which do not penalise depositors for behaving ethically in situations out of their control, and a summary of the discussion.

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 thatwe believeenables 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 2020 https://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.

This paper provides remarks for a management plan for Brazilian linguistic documentation repositories in order to contribute to their conservation. The depreciation, authorship, sharing, and financing problems are discussed, pointing solutions.

La presente obra reúne nueve trabajos enfocados en la documentación lingüística, los cuales son resultado de investigaciones ancladas a proyectos de preservación de lenguas y su legado cultural. El objetivo es exponer al lector perspectivas y prácticas de la labor documental, como la literacidad, descripción gramatical, repositorios y prácticas éticas, diagnósticos sociolingüísticos y de vitalidad, y explicaciones etnográficas de fenómenos relacionados con eventos comunicativos. Producto de un esfuerzo multinstitucional, este libro pretende fomentar nuevas discusiones en torno a propuestas pedagógicas, de organización de archivos, de laboratorios de lenguas o materiales existentes en el país, entre otras prácticas que protejan la diversidad lingüística.

This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic data are managed, cited, and maintained for long-term access.

Language archives are not only a valuable resource for language communities to tell their stories and to create lasting records of their ways of life, but also for those interested in anthropology, linguistics, agriculture, or art history. This recent emphasis on archiving primary datasets in linguistics has resulted in an abundance of datasets online; however, of the languages of South Asia, only a small percentage are represented in digital language archives or described thoroughly. Though several of these languages are being documented, this material is at risk of being lost or inaccessible without concerted attention paid to long-term preservation. There are several obstacles to documenting and archiving language materials from this area, including political instability and lack of access to infrastructure. This submission reviews one particular challenge to data management relevant to South Asia, which is the complexity of names (of individuals, groups, and languages). We provi...

Preservation and revitalization of Indigenous and endangered languages supports a resilient future. Funding agencies have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, a gap exists between the way language data is organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that dataand how it should be organized and representedby language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper presents the work of the interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers, and practitioners to address this curricular gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions. ALISE RESEARCH TAXONOMY TOPICS digital humanities; community engagement; metadata; data curation.

La presente obra reúne nueve trabajos enfocados en la documentación lingüística, los cuales son resultado de investigaciones ancladas a proyectos de preservación de lenguas y su legado cultural. El objetivo es exponer al lector perspectivas y prácticas de la labor documental, como la literacidad, descripción gramatical, repositorios y prácticas éticas, diagnósticos sociolingüísticos y de vitalidad, y explicaciones etnográficas de fenómenos relacionados con eventos comunicativos. Producto de un esfuerzo multinstitucional, este libro pretende fomentar nuevas discusiones en torno a propuestas pedagógicas, de organización de archivos, de laboratorios de lenguas o materiales existentes en el país, entre otras prácticas que protejan la diversidad lingüística.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the author or the publisher.

El libro reúne nueve trabajos enfocados en la documentación lingüística, los cuales son resultado de investigaciones ancladas a proyectos de preservación de lenguas y su legado cultural. El objetivo es exponer al lector perspectivas y prácticas de la labor documental, como la literacidad, descripción gramatical, repositorios y prácticas éticas, diagnósticos sociolingüísticos y de vitalidad, y explicaciones etnográficas de fenómenos relacionados con eventos comunicativos.

Preservation and revitalization of Indigenous and endangered languages supports a resilient future. Funding agencies have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, a gap exists between the way language data is organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that dataand how it should be organized and representedby language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper presents the work of the interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers, and practitioners to address this curricular gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions.

Language archiving involves the collection and curation of a variety of language materials. As an emerging language archive, CoRSAL caters to a range of different language depositors with different research needs. As such, we have developed a workflow process that can accommodate this diversity.

Ramari Dongosaro, or Sonsorolese (ISO 639-3 son) is a nuclear Micronesian language spoken in the South-West islands of the Republic of Palau. Sonsorolese is the official language of the State of Sonsorol but still lacks in status and corpus (Matsumoto 2020). When discussing literacy efforts in Micronesia, Rehg (2004) mentions that these efforts were in general unsuccessful because speakers were not sure what to do with their language(s). In this talk, we present and discuss a collaborative project between a linguist and a local youth NGO, the Young Historians of Sonsorol. The aim of the talk is to present efforts - to maintain the language within the community - to raise awareness and status within the wider Palauan society - to build capacity in language documentation for future local projects In particular, we present our current efforts for multimodal documentation. We discuss the role of Participatory Action Research (Fals-Borda 1991; Kemmis & McTaggart 2005; Reason & Bradbury 2006), informed by Pasifika values and methodologies (Henry & Pene 2001; Bishop 1998; Toumu’a, Sanga & Fua 2018) in documenting and planning the status of the language. We compare past initiatives and discuss ethical issues in language documentation, language planning, and training and capacity building in language reclamation.

This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic data are managed, cited, and maintained for long-term access.

Preservation and revitalization of Indigenous and endangered languages supports a resilient future. Funding agencies have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, a gap exists between the way language data is organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that dataand how it should be organized and representedby language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper presents the work of the interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers, and practitioners to address this curricular gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions. ALISE RESEARCH TAXONOMY TOPICS digital humanities; community engagement; metadata; data curation.

Language archives are not only a valuable resource for language communities to tell their stories and to create lasting records of their ways of life, but also for those interested in anthropology, linguistics, agriculture, or art history. This recent emphasis on archiving primary datasets in linguistics has resulted in an abundance of datasets online; however, of the languages of South Asia, only a small percentage are represented in digital language archives or described thoroughly. Though several of these languages are being documented, this material is at risk of being lost or inaccessible without concerted attention paid to long-term preservation. There are several obstacles to documenting and archiving language materials from this area, including political instability and lack of access to infrastructure. This submission reviews one particular challenge to data management relevant to South Asia, which is the complexity of names (of individuals, groups, and languages). We provi...

Preservation and revitalization of Indigenous and endangered languages supports a resilient future. Funding agencies have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, a gap exists between the way language data is organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that dataand how it should be organized and representedby language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper presents the work of the interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers, and practitioners to address this curricular gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions. ALISE RESEARCH TAXONOMY TOPICS digital humanities; community engagement; metadata; data curation.

Over the last two decades there has been a surge in activists, linguists, anthropologists, documenters digitally recording endangered language use. These unique records often are uploaded to corporate social media sites or to privately run websites. Despite popular belief, uploading these materials to a server does not mean they are archived and preserved for future generations. In this paper we discuss the differences between professional archiving systems and content management system (CMS) based approaches to making language materials accessible. Looking at the example of the Archive of Languages and Cultures of Ethnic Groups of Thailand we discuss the benefits of a Mukurtu based community website, and how linking it to a professional archive can ensure long-term preservation of precious and unique language materials.

for other reasons as well. The project of writing a grammar is substantially larger in scale than many other research projects. The grammar writer is called upon to have comprehensive knowledge of a language, from its phonetics to its discourse structure, coupled with socio-cultural knowledge. While pieces of a grammar are independent, components of the grammar intersect and interact with one another, requiring careful strategy and planning in how to go about writing. The grammar writer must thus put careful thought into how they will complete a project that has no logical end to it, how they will organize the grammar, and how they will relate the pieces of different parts of the grammar to one another. The scale is large, and there is no particular template for writing a grammar. Much depends on the language itself and on who the author anticipates will use the grammar. There are many complex decisions to make, making grammar writing an art. There is also much to balance: What topics must be covered and which are optional? What language is represented? What kind of depth is needed for each topic? How do the pieces fit together to create a whole? Even from this brief discussion, it is perhaps possible to see both the pleasure and the challenge that Valentine talks about. 4. CONTEXT IN WHICH DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR IS SITUATED. Grammar writing has probably always been a complex undertaking, but writing grammars today strikes us as perhaps even more challenging than it was in the past for several reasons. The most important change that has taken place is the recognition of the endangered state of so many languages of the world. This fact puts grammar-writing projects in a context different from the past and subjects the project to different sets of expectations and requirements. Many questions must be considered in writing a grammar that were not so important in the past. Who is the grammar written for? What kind of language should it represent? Can a single grammar serve all audiences? Coupled with language endangerment are the rapid changes in technology in the past twenty or so years. One can gather amounts of data that were unprecedented until just recently. The potential scope of a grammar, as discussed above, has always been vast, but the advancement of the technology pushes the horizon even further: it allows more questions to be asked and also allows for new types of analysis and new forms in which grammars can be presented. Thus, grammar writing in the present day has become more important, and at the same time, more complex and complicated. This is a very good time for us to reexamine the process and method of grammar writing. 5. WHY DO WE NEED YET ANOTHER BOOK ON GRAMMAR WRITING? There have been a few books on grammar writing published in recent years (Ameka, Dench, and Evans 2006; Payne and Weber 2007). One might ask why another book is necessary, given the recent attention to the writing of grammars. This book comes at the question of grammar writing in a somewhat different way than the other books. In particular, the focus of this

Over the last two decades there has been a surge in activists, linguists, anthropologists, documenters digitally recording endangered language use. These unique records often are uploaded to corporate social media sites or to privately run websites. Despite popular belief, uploading these materials to a server does not mean they are archived and preserved for future generations. In this paper we discuss the differences between professional archiving systems and content management system (CMS) based approaches to making language materials accessible. Looking at the example of the Archive of Languages and Cultures of Ethnic Groups of Thailand we discuss the benefits of a Mukurtu based community website, and how linking it to a professional archive can ensure long-term preservation of precious and unique language materials.

ethics, and linguistic data. While the causes of language endangerment are many and complex, social and cultural dislocation due to unequal power relations between minority communities and majority populations have played major roles in facilitating language shift (Grenoble 2011). Traditional models of linguistic research often mirror these unequal power relationships (Leonard 2018), with the result that linguists researching Indigenous languages may be seen as agents of social and cultural dislocation as well. Moreover, Indigenous communities may view linguistic research as out of step with the impending threat of language loss. In particular, communities experiencing rapid language shift and consequent language endangerment may take a more holistic view of language research as being embedded within a process of language reclamation (cf. Leonard 2017) and psychological healing (cf. Meek 2010; Jacob 2013) against a backdrop of numerous ethical violations that underlie language shift. Hence, any discussion of ethics in linguistic data requires a discussion of Indigenous data and must adhere to protocols for working with Indigenous data, as well as to the broader sociopolitical contexts in which language work takes place. However, where formal, legal frameworks do exist governing Indigenous and minority language data, these frameworks tend to be modeled on those developed for large languages rather than the cultural values or political concerns of Indigenous populations. We thus focus in this chapter on ethical issues in relation to Indigenous languages and the communities they come from, for it is in this context that the intersection of people, ethics, and data has been least formalized, despite its significant implications. Some of the limitations in theorizing this intersection reflect that in most scholarly literature the notion of

We describe a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves ollaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or mall group of language speakers, and was developed as an aid to investigating grammatical categories relevant to social cognition. The pictures set up a dramatic story in which participants can feel empathetic involvement with the characters, and trace individual motivations, mental and physical states, and points of view. The data-gathering task allows different cultural groups to imbue the pictures with their own experiences, concerns, and conventions, and stimulates the spontaneous use of previously under-recorded linguistic structures. We argue that stimulus-based elicitation tasks that are designed to stimulate a range of speech types (descriptions, dialogic interactions, narrative) within the single task contribute quantitatively ...

We describe a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves collaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or small group ...

We describe a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves ollaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or mall group of language speakers, and was developed as an aid to investigating grammatical categories relevant to social cognition. The pictures set up a dramatic story in which participants can feel empathetic involvement with the characters, and trace individual motivations, mental and physical states, and points of view. The data-gathering task allows different cultural groups to imbue the pictures with their own experiences, concerns, and conventions, and stimulates the spontaneous use of previously under-recorded linguistic structures. We argue that stimulus-based elicitation tasks that are designed to stimulate a range of speech types (descriptions, dialogic interactions, narrative) within the single task contribute quantitatively ...

This dissertation uses raw data of Ramari Hatohobei or Tobian (ISO 639-3 tox), an endangered Micronesian language, archived at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) for the description of its prosodic patterns. The primary aim is to contribute to the description of Tobian and fill the gap in Regh’s (1993) paper on Proto-Micronesian prosody. A secondary aim is to identify the extent to which archived data could be useful for linguistic description and in particular for the analysis of prosody. In the first part, a discussion on the role of language archives is presented with some background information on Tobian and Micronesian prosody. The second part describes the methodology used for the description of Tobian prosodic patterns, while in the third part, the analysis and results of the prosodic patterns in Tobian are presented, followed by a discussion on the usefulness and quality of the particular collection. In the concluding remarks, some ideas for future research are introduced.

This paper gives a detailed overview of the archived language documentation materials for the two languages spoken in northern Ambrym, Vanuatu: North Am-brym and Fanbyak. I discuss the speakers and the language situation in northern Ambrym to give readers an introduction to the culture of the area. The archived materials encompass five different research projects focussing on the two languages , including documentation and literacy development projects. Data collection , workflows, file-naming conventions, and community involvement are all discussed. The deposited materials are described along with overviews of the different genres, sub-genres, and keywords to enable users to navigate and discover relevant recordings.

Circum-Baikal Asia is a linguistically and culturally rich area where until modern days many languages representing a number of linguistic families exist. In terms of indigenous population it is occupied predominantly by the Buryat, Ewenki, Tofa, Soyot, Khamnigan, and many other native speaking communities. Whereas linguistic data collection for languages in the region around the Lake Baikal started several centuries ago, it is only now that the possibility of establishing a language archive can be seriously discussed. During Soviet period an extensive linguistic and folkloristic fieldwork resulted in huge amounts of data collected in analogue formats. Unfortunately some of the recordings are not recoverable or show very poor quality after digitalization. In this paper I will argue in favor of indispensability of a linguistic archive for languages of Circum-Baikal Asia and discuss the issues connected with the preparation of older data and the collection of new data in the Documentary Linguistics framework.