Collaborative Research: Workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives

University Of Alaska Fairbanks Campus, Fairbanks AK

Investigators

Abstract

Digital language archives worldwide now host thousands of hours of audio and video digital recordings and linguistically analyzed data samples. The processing and storing of this material has happened so quickly that adequate attention has not been paid to whether deposited materials can be appropriately searched, analyzed, understood, and interpreted by various research and speaker communities. Design anthropologist Christina Wasson from the University of North Texas and linguist and language archivist Gary Holton from the University of Alaska will investigate how digital language deposits at major language archives are structured. Bringing together language archivists, field linguists, and endangered language community members in a workshop setting, Wasson and Holton will use principles of User Center Design to evaluate the usability of archives from several perspectives including access, navigation, and database structure. The interdisciplinary dialogue at this workshop could initiate a paradigm shift for language archive designers and managers and ultimately have positive repercussions for computationally-based research methods in linguistics.