The J. P. Harrington Database Project: The California Materials

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Martha Macri and her colleagues will conduct two years of linguistic research on the J. P. Harrington Database Project. The goal is to increase access to the linguistic and ethnographic notes on Native California languages collected by J. P. Harrington during the first half of the twentieth century. The people Harrington interviewed were often among the last remaining speakers of their languages. His notes thus represent knowledge that would otherwise be lost. Over half of an estimated 500,000 pages of Harrington's notes are on California languages. Researchers will begin by transcribing these. They will then code the materials for linguistic and ethnographic categories that maximize their usefulness to linguists, biologists, geographers, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and also to Native American communities. The transcribed and coded notes will be available through a database on the web. It will be possible to search these notes by language (e.g., several Native California languages), semantic domain (kin terms, toponyms, flora, etc.), and other cultural and linguistic categories. The database will also generate a running text of Harrington's notes as well as lexicons for each language with Harrington's English and Spanish glosses. Each of the world's languages represents a unique solution to the expression of human cognition and to the variety of ways in which humans categorize and interact with their social and physical environment. Most of the Native California languages that Harrington recorded are no longer spoken, or now have only a few elderly speakers. Harrington's materials are thus cherished by Native American communities engaged in language and cultural revitalization and valuable to scholars from a wide variety of disciplines. The J. P. Harrington Database Project will increase access for Native American communities as well as linguists and other scholars to these materials.