Less-Networked Speaker Communities and Digital Language Archives

Fieldwork, description, and preservation of research results are often seen as endpoints of language documentation projects. Although archives are doing their best to ensure that source communities can ultimately gain access to the language materials they produce, little is being done to facilitate their involvement in the ongoing curation of those materials. Enhancing and extending such involvement will significantly increase both the scholarly value of documented materials and its impact in source communities. Using the situations of rural Papua New Guinea and Cameroon as model cases, this project will bring together an international group of scholars, technical experts, and community members for a two day conference to intensively explore appropriate “bridging” technologies and make recommendations to help digital language archives overcome fundamental obstacles to maintaining direct, ongoing relationships with archive stakeholders who reside in less-networked communities

Review of Language and poverty

National Foreign Language Resource Cente

The IATH ELAN Text-Sync Tool: A Simple System for Mobilizing ELAN Transcripts On- or Off-Line

In this article we present the IATH ELAN Text-Sync Tool (ETST; see http://community.village.virginia.edu/etst), a series of scripts and workflow for playing ELAN files and associated audiovisual media in a web browser either on- or off-line. ELAN has become an indispensable part of documentary linguists’ toolkit, but it is less than ideal for mobilizing the transcribed media it allows linguists to create when they have reason to display these materials in non-research settings where linguists are not the primary audience. In conjunction with display of a video or audio file, ETST plays tiers of transcript for overlapping speech, along with optional glosses, and distinguishes speakers with participant codes. Using ETST requires no programming knowledge, but with some such knowledge the tool can be readily customized to suit users’ needs. To that extent, ETST is a simple browser-based transcript player that can be used either as is, “out of the box”, or as a basis for further development. We hope that ETST will be a helpful addition to documentary linguists’ repertoire of digital tools, making it easier for them to share materials with all those who have a stake in their research.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Collaboration or Participant Observation? Rethinking Models of 'Linguistic Social Work'

Documentary linguists aspiring to conduct socially responsible research find themselves immersed in a literature on ‘collaborative methods’ that does not address some of the most pressing interpersonal challenges that fieldworkers experience in their community relationships. As recent controversies about the nature of collaboration indicate, collaborative models embed assumptions about reciprocity, negotiation, and the meaning and moral valence of categories like ‘research,’ ‘language,’ and ‘documentation,’ which do not translate equally well across all communities. There is thus a need for a method flexible enough to respond to the complexity and diversity of what goes on in particular cross-cultural researcher-community relationships. In this article, we encourage documentary linguists to consider the benefits of participant observation, a research method that is designed specifically to deal with the interpersonal nature of fieldwork in the human sciences. Because it ties knowledge production directly to the development of social relationships across difference, participant observation can help documentary linguists think fruitfully about the social approaches they take in their fieldwork, whether these ultimately come to involve formal collaboration or some other form of reciprocity.National Foreign Language Resource Cente