Metadata in Language Documentation and Description

Since the LSA Committee on Endangered Language Preservation was established in 1992, interest among linguists in documenting endangered languages has grown tremendously, and the new field of documentary linguistics has emerged. Dedicated sessions at annual meetings, new funding initiatives such as the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages program and the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, and organizations such the Open Language Archives Community have helped both to stimulate and to support this interest. The urgency of the need for more and better language documentation projects is another major stimulus, both for languages that are nearly extinct and for those that may be teetering on the brink of survival.

As linguists have expanded their efforts at documentation there has been an increasing interest in collecting, preserving, and disseminating old and new records—e.g., audio, video, and text—of the world's languages. In order to for this to be done well, it is necessary to associate metadata, data about the data, with these records to ensure that their context, meaning and use can be properly determined. Metadata is therefore required not only for archiving and preservation, but also for management, identification, retrieval and understanding of the data within a documentation project. Metadata is also necessary for the proper treatment of ethical responsibilities in research, including providing various levels of access and use of language materials.

There have been several approaches to notation of metadata, ranging from limited standardized sets (such as OLAC and IMDI) to open descriptive accounts reflecting the diversity of language documentation projects. Recently, there have been suggestions that a new direction needs to be taken, namely development of ‘meta-documentary linguistics' which is concerned with the methods, tools, and theoretical underpinnings for setting up, carrying out and concluding a documentary linguistics research project. This is the documentation of the documentation research itself.

This tutorial and poster session will provide those interested in documenting and describing languages with concrete information about metadata and meta-documentation, covering the different models and how they can be employed from the perspectives of creators and users of the documentary materials in linguistics and neighboring fields. These sessions will bring together field linguists, computational linguists, language archivists, anthropologists, and archaeologists to discuss the issues from an interdisciplinary perspective. The poster session will focus on presentation of a number of archives of endangered languages materials and display their approaches to metadata.

Tutorial talks covered general topics such as how to design a metadata system and what it can be used for, what kinds of metadata researchers are collecting, how linguists' metadata relates to that developed by anthropologists and archaeologists, and what information archives need for the best description and preservation of language materials. The poster session presented specific case studies from on-going archiving projects. It also served as an opportunity for audience members to have individual discussions with representatives of archives which may be suitable for their materials.

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