From the field to the web: implementing best-practice recommendations in documentary linguistics

New methods of documenting languages with digital technologies has led to a multitude of different formats that are difficult to reuse over time. To overcome the problems surrounding the portability of digital language documentation, linguists are in the process of formulating best-practice recommendations to increase the likelihood of their work's long-term survival. This paper describes the implementation of a comprehensive set of current best-practice recommendations pertaining to content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights in the context of the language documentation efforts of the Texas German Dialect Project. This project is different from others in that it is not primarily concerned with digitizing and archiving existing recordings. Instead, the archive it is creating is the end-result of a research project whose workflow begins with data-collection in the filed and ends with depositing digitized and annotated language materials in a web-accessible digital archive of Texas German. This paper shows how a number of conflicting best-practice recommendations can be resolved, thereby satisfying the diverse needs of academic research, teaching, and outreach to the community. As such, the results reported here are an important contribution to the search for strategies guaranteeing the long-term survival of digital language documentation resources.

Hans Christian BoasEmail: