SGER: Archiving Endangered Languages: Communication Among Competing Approaches and Education in Best Practices

Linguistic Society Of America

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) will host two workshops on best practices in electronic archiving. The LSA plays a leadership role in combating the decline of linguistic, cognitive, historical, and cultural resources entailed by language endangerment. The LSA will gather representatives of major groups that have initiated primary endangered language archiving projects or have sponsored endangered languages activities for a two-day "conversation" at the Annual LSA Meeting in Oakland, California, January 5-6, 2005. The Oakland meeting will continue discussions that began electronically in October, 2004. The group will finalize plans for a conference on these issues to be held at the 2005 Linguistic Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July, 2005. A major goal of these efforts is to engender transparency among competing formats for electronic archiving. The effort for conference planning will be coordinated with the activities of the new Ken Hale Chair in Field Linguistics at the Linguistic Summer Institute. This project is consistent with the goals of the new interagency partnership on Documenting Endangered Languages (NSF 04-605). The workshops will foster international collaboration, and will enhance the training of graduate students by preparing them for the technical aspects of building electronic corpora.