Workshop on Endangered Language Data Preservation: The Need for Standards, June 21-24, 2001, Santa Barbara, California

Wayne State University, Detroit MI

Investigators

Abstract

Members of the linguistics profession are faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to digitize language data is rapidly multiplying as a result of the increasing availability and sophistication of web technology. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, field linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon; and the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be set without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages. Metalanguage or metadata guidelines which are designed on the basis of well-known western languages will not be adequate to the urgent task of archiving as much linguistic data as possible in the face of widespread language attrition and loss. If linguistic archives are to offer the widest possible access to the data and provide it in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. This is the proposed topic of a 3-day workshop which will be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America 2001 Summer Institute and will involve experienced field linguists, computational linguists, and language archivists. The objective of the workshop is to bring field linguists and computational linguists together with two primary goals: (1) to educate one other about the very different challenges field linguists and computational linguists anticipate in the establishment of an archive for endangered language data, and (2) to solicit recommendations about two essential elements of archive infrastructure: text markup and metadata.