Abstract

The process of documenting and describing the world's languages is undergoing radical transformation with the rapid uptake of new digital technologies for capture, storage, annotation, and dissemination. While these technologies greatly enhance our ability to create digital data, their uncritical adoption has compromised our ability to preserve this data. The new digital language resources of all kinds -- lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings -- are difficult to reuse and less portable than the conventional printed resources they replace. This article is concerned with the portability of digital language resources, specifically with their ability to transcend computer environments, scholarly communities, domains of application, and the passage of time. We begin by reviewing current uses of software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description. This sheds light on how digital language resources are created and managed, and leads to an analysis of portability problems in the seven areas of content, format, discovery, access, citation, preservation, and rights. After characterizing each problem we articulate a set of values which underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and which serve as requirements for new practices supporting the creation of portable language resources. Next we lay out an extensive set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-based effort that we envision. We conclude with a discussion of OLAC, the Open Language Archives Community, which provides a process that may be used to identify community-agreed best practices over the long term.

Citations