Language Archiving

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors examine the role of language archiving in endangered-language scholarship. First they explore the history of archiving for endangered languages, from the age of Boas and the archiving of analog materials through the rise of the endangered-language movement and the development of best practices for digital archiving to the current era of established archiving standards. Then they discuss a potential future for language archiving, that of the participatory model of language archiving, which is radically user-centered and draws on trends in the archival sciences. Next they present some of the extant archives for language documentation, the members of the Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archiving Network. Finally, because archiving is an activity that is now available to anyone undertaking endangered-language work, they close by presenting the steps one would take to work with an archive to deposit one’s own materials.

acervos e a documentação linguística

“…Primary data are the raw audio or video recordings or written observations of language, including narratives, oral histories, elicitation, conversations, interviews, and experimental protocols; secondary data are transcriptions, translations, morphological segmentations, glosses, and other types of annotation that require some level of preliminary analysis to create (HIMMELMANN, 2012;THIEBERGER and BEREZ, 2012;KUNG, et al, 2020). For accessible overviews of language archiving and its history, see also Henke and Berez-Kroeker (2016), Berez-Kroeker and Henke (2018), Kaplan and Lemov (2019), and Kung (2020).…”

“…When the primary data are archived, those data can be reused for additional language documentation work, as well as other types of linguistic analysis. Further, archiving the primary and secondary data allows for the analytical output to be verifiable and reproducible (HIMMELMANN, 2006;BEREZ-KROEKER et al, 2018). Ultimately, archiving primary and secondary data in a digital repository where they are publicly accessible facilitates data reuse, and provides a stable means for citing the data (for recent guidance, see CONZETT and DE SMEDT, 2022), in the form of a persistent identifier.…”

Evaluation and analysis of digital language archives development platforms: a parametric approach

“…The major objective of a digital language archive is to make language resources available to the community, eager scholars and learners who want to learn the language (Boas, 2007). The key to the effective construction and maintenance of digital language archives is the selection of a comprehensive and specialised repository or system with skilled professionals (Kroeker and Henke, 2018). CMSs, digital repositories and ACMSs are among the technologies used to create a digital language archive.…”

A CARE and FAIR-Ready Distributed Access Control System for Human-Created Data

“…Language archiving has received considerable attention in the last 20 years because of the importance of the practice in the documentary linguistics tradition originating with Himmelmann [4]. Discussions of access to language archives [1,3] concentrate on the need for access control, who should be involved in making decisions and how those decisions can be documented. Perhaps understandably, the details and implementation of processes at a technical level have received less attention.…”