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Nicholas THIEBERGER
Senior Research Fellow, University of Melbourne
(Melbourne, Australia)
Multilingualism in Cyberspace –
Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages 33
1. Introduction
Supporting small languages can take many forms. A key to long term access to
information about most of the world’s languages is in the curation of existing
records and the proper creation of records now. The network of language
archives that exist in the world have been developing standards and have
also been training practitioners (linguists, speakers or language workers) in
good methods for language documentation. Websites can deliver accessible
information, but the risk is that unique records will be placed only into websites
and will not survive in the longer term. Archival forms of the records should be
properly described using standard metadata terms and be created and stored
at the highest possible quality, for later delivery in compressed formats suitable
to web delivery.
In this paper I outline the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in
Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) (http://paradisec.org.au) as an example
of a new kind of archive that is emerging, one that is not only a repository
of curated material, but one that is involved in training, adopting standard
formats for primary records and creating workflows that will result in multiple
outputs from linguistic fieldwork. We have also developed a method for
presenting interlinear text and media online (http://www.eopas.org) in order
to encourage the creation of language records in reusable formats and to work
towards a language museum in which samples of language in performance can
be viewed on the internet.
I suggest that we need to provide a service of advice and data conversion
for those for whom it is simply too difficult to do this work themselves. An
example of such a service is the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity
(http://www.rnld.org).
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Work reported on in this paper was supported by the following Australian Research Council grants:
SR0566965 – Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks;
DP0450342 – New methodologies for representing and accessing resources on endangered languages: a case
study from South Efate.
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