Methods and Results in Language Documentation using Literary Digital Editions

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Colonial archives present a range of methodological challenges for scholars. On the one hand, they contain valuable information about Indigenous languages, histories, and societies in the Pre-European and early colonial periods. On the other hand, these documents are often written by religious and political officials who sought to change or eradicate the traditions they described. To address this well-known problem, scholars must develop methods that disentangle colonial interventions from Indigenous linguistic, historical, and cultural data. This project offers one such solution. In collaboration with Indigenous scholars from the community, this project uses open source, standards-compliant tools to build a digital collection of five versions of the longest and most complete pre-1492 book of the Americas. By showing where Indigenous and non-Native authors record vocabularies, syntactic structures, and morphologies in different ways and at different moments, this project generates a corpus and methodology that can be applied to other linguistic and historical contexts, including future educational efforts. Because there is little data on the effectiveness of digital materials on Indigenous language acquisition for heritage learners and non-heritage speakers, this project creates important materials for future research. This project applies the international, scholarly standards of textual encoding developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to the longest and most complete pre-1492 book to survive the conquest. Other digital projects represent the text in manuscript facsimiles, a format that is inaccessible to non-experts, cannot easily be used for language learning, and privileges the colonial-era act of writing rather than the original oral tradition. In contrast, this project’s five-item digital collection of historical and modern texts, videos, and translations, developed by Indigenous scholars in collaboration with non-Native faculty and student researchers, uses encoding tools to reveal colonial interventions and highlight Indigenous scholars’ corrections to orthography, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. These tools include referencing string analytical attributes <rs ana> to tag characters, places, and objects in the text, the <space> element to preserve poetic orality and align concepts according to morphological parallelism and phrase-final markers, and annotations, managed through a relational database of 880 cultural topics, to present competing scholarly interpretations of textual passages, phonetics, and syntax. The collection is housed on a platform that uses an open-source Static Site Generator framework to avoid the long loading time of server-based websites, paired with a Progressive Web Application framework to provide mobile readers with an app-like experience that does not sacrifice phone storage. This digital humanities approach to historical textual analytics allows a variety of users, including researchers, teachers, students, and interested members of the public, to represent the corpus and code in ways that cannot be disseminated through print. In so doing it creates a new tool for language learning, textual analysis, and linguistic study by native speakers, heritage learners, and non-Native researchers and students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.