Finding the Locus of Best Practice: Technology Training in an Alaskan Language Community

At the time of writing, a three-year language technology project focused on the Dena'ina Athabascan language of Southcentral Alaska is coming to its end. The Dena'ina Archiving, Training, and Access (DATA) project was developed to address three primary concerns: (1) requests by the Dena'ina community for greater access to existing language materials; (2) the need to implement enduring standards of digital language archiving; and (3) the need for intensive training of community members and graduate students in language technology and fieldwork techniques. It is the last of these goals, training, that is the focus of this paper. We discuss our experiences bringing language technology into a small speaker community setting, and reflect on why the results of our training efforts differed from what we expected. It seems that we, as linguists, may initially have been blinded by our 'best practice ideology' to the unique and personal interests of Dena'ina heritage speakers regarding the place of technology in language revitalisation efforts. Ultimately we found that a true division of labour between linguists and community members may be the best solution in situations of severe language endangerment

Directional reference in discourse and narrative: Comparing indigenous and non-indigenous genres in Ahtna

National Foreign Language Resource Cente

A Brief History of Archiving in Language Documentation, with an Annotated Bibliography

We survey the history of practices, theories, and trends in archiving for the purposes of language documentation and endangered language conservation. We identify four major periods in the history of such archiving. First, a period from before the time of Boas and Sapir until the early 1990s, in which analog materials were collected and deposited into physical repositories that were not easily accessible to many researchers or speaker communities. A second period began in the 1990s, when increased attention to language endangerment and the development of modern documentary linguistics engendered a renewed and redefined focus on archiving and an embrace of digital technology. A third period took shape in the early twenty-first century, where technological advancements and efforts to develop standards of practice met with important critiques. Finally, in the current period, conversations have arisen toward participatory models for archiving, which break traditional boundaries to expand the audiences and uses for archives while involving speaker communities directly in the archival process. Following the article, we provide an annotated bibliography of 85 publications from the literature surrounding archiving in documentary linguistics. This bibliography contains cornerstone contributions to theory and practice, and it also includes pieces that embody conversations representative of particular historical periods.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Reflections on reproducible research

Reproducibility in language documentation and description means that the analysis given in descriptive publication is presented in a way that allows the reader to access the data on which the claims are based, to verify the analysis for themself. Linguists, including Himmelmann, have long pointed to the centrality of documentation data to linguistic description. Over the twenty years since Himmelmann’s 1998 paper we have seen a growth in digital archiving, and the rise of the Open Access movement. Although there is good infrastructure in place to make reproducible research possible, few descriptive publications clearly link to underlying data, and very little documentation data is publicly accessible. We discuss some of the institutional roadblocks to reproducibility, including a lack of support for the development of published primary data. We also look at what work on language documentation and description can learn from the recent replication crisis in psychology.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Reflections on language documentation in North America

In this paper we reflect on the state of language documentation in North America, especially Canada and Alaska. Using our own early experiences with the archival record on languages of North America as a launching point, we discuss changes that have come to this field over the past twenty years. These include especially the increasing recognition of long traditions of community-based language research within North America, and of members of language communities as primary stakeholders in efforts to preserve and properly share records of linguistic knowledge.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Review of The Traditional Ecological Knowledge of the Solega: A Linguistic Perspective

National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume, Reflections on Language Documentation 20 Years after Himmelmann 1998, providing a short justification for the volume, summarizing each of the four major parts of the volume, and identifying major themes that emerge in the 31 chapters. It concludes by noting some of the volume's limitations.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Reproducible Research and the Americanist Tradition in Linguistics

Keynote address at the 19th Workshop on American Indigenous Languages, UC Santa Barbara, May 7-8 2016

Reproducible Research in linguistics: The past and future of “data work” in our field

Presentation at the University of Oregon Department of Linguistics Colloquium Series, November 10, 201

A survey of current reproducibility practices in linguistics publications

Poster: In order to move forward toward reproducible research in linguistics, we first need to know where we are now with regard to our practices for methodological clarity and data citation in publications. In this poster we share the results of a study of over 370 journal articles, dissertations, and grammars, which is taken as a sample of current practices in the field. The publications all come from a ten-year span. The journals were selected for broad coverage. Grammars included published grammars and dissertations written as grammars, with broad geographic coverage, both in terms of subject language and publisher or university.These publications are critiqued on the basis of transparency of data source, data collection methods, analysis, and storage. While we find examples of transparent reporting, most of the surveyed research does not include key metadata, methodological information, or citations that are resolvable to the data on which the analyses are based.In order to move forward toward reproducible research in linguistics, we first need to know where we are now with regard to our practices for methodological clarity and data citation in publications. In this poster we share the results of a study of over 370 journal articles, dissertations, and grammars, which is taken as a sample of current practices in the field. The publications all come from a ten-year span. The journals were selected for broad coverage. Grammars included published grammars and dissertations written as grammars, with broad geographic coverage, both in terms of subject language and publisher or university.These publications are critiqued on the basis of transparency of data source, data collection methods, analysis, and storage. While we find examples of transparent reporting, most of the surveyed research does not include key metadata, methodological information, or citations that are resolvable to the data on which the analyses are based.This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant SMA-1447886