Centering Language Data in Technology Choices: The Case of the New Tunica Dictionary

The language documentation and revitalization world has many examples of productive community-academic collaborations. These collaborations often take place with the help of technology: emails to schedule our language sessions, google docs to store collective documents, file structures with naming conversations to store audio media, and software to store and analyze language data, to name a few. In short, technology is central to these relationships and the language work that takes place in them.

While I’ve partaken in many informal discussions about technology choices, such discussions are noticeably absent from formal conversation about language documentation and revitalization. This is important because language data, once entered into one software or technology, can often get stuck there, making future projects difficult and labor intensive.

This talk discusses the technology selection process surrounding the New Tunica Dictionary.  It traces decisions made nearly ten years ago, highlighting the technological tension between the immediate needs for language research and the long term data needs for language revitalization. This talk highlights aspects that went well, as well as those that proved challenging on the journey, and shows how a focus on data structure, maintainability and reusability have driven revitalization projects that were once unfathomable to the fledgling Tunica revitalization project.

Bio: Dr. PT Anderson is the founder of Revitalization Technology LLC and author of Revitalization Lexicography. With a PhD in linguistic anthropology and ten years’ experience as a software engineer, Dr. Anderson uses their unique skillset to make language technology accessible to communities engaged in language revitalization. Dr. Anderson has worked with the Tunica Language Project since 2011.