Building a Hawaiian Spoken Language Digital Repository

University Of Hawaii At Hilo, Hilo HI

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of understanding the range of human linguistic features and the limits on their distribution requires in-depth data sets from each language in order to make and test scientifically valid hypotheses. This study will contribute to that major goal by creating a digital corpus of speech and transcripts of an endangered language for which no corpus currently exists. The corpus will result in a large publicly available data set, available for researchers to make new queries or to test the reproducibility of prior findings. This will foster robust and reliable research on a diversity of subjects. Broader impacts include the integration of this corpus into immersion-based language education from pre-school to university and into the curriculum of the natural sciences and beyond. The project will also engage underrepresented groups as citizen scientists and will create a publicly available corpus of an endangered Indigenous U.S. language, Hawaiian. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of the indigenous languages of the U.S. In addition, the project will broaden participation in the social sciences by the training of Native Hawaiian language scholars and is co-funded by the NSF Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP). In this project, the team will build Kani'âina, the digital archive of recordings and transcripts of spoken Native Hawaiian. Summarily, Kani'âina will be a digital repository that will (i) allow interactive access to an estimated 900-1200 hours of extant recordings of spoken Native Hawaiian and transcripts through a bilingual digital library interface that is already arguably the single most-accessed site for Hawaiian language materials; (ii) properly preserve those recordings and transcripts permanently in a world-class OLAC-compliant digital archive (thus making them discoverable to other scientists); (iii) implement a procedure for crowd-sourced transcription of additional recordings from e.g. the public and from University of Hawai'i students of Hawaiian language; and (iv) serve as a catalyst for a cross-campus graduate educational exchange between students at two campuses of the University of Hawai'i. The project will use participatory archiving of language documentation, enabling the public to access and contribute to the transcription and content-tagging of recordings of spoken language. Project activities include the transcription and content-tagging of recordings of spoken language. The merit and impact of this project center on the kinds of information that are encoded in the recordings themselves. Making this information freely available will in turn make a wide range of scientific and ethno-scientific topics accessible and will be revolutionary for STEM education on Hawaiian subjects, including linguistics, ecological knowledge, environmental sustainability, and the historical anthropology of the Hawaiian islands. This project is a cross-campus collaboration between the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, a US Department of Education Native Hawaiian Serving Institution and the University of Hawai'i at Mânoa.