AILLA Launches Free Online Course on Archiving/AILLA Lanza un Curso Gratuito y en Línea sobre Archivado

AILLA Launches Free Online Course on Archiving

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is delighted to announce the launch of a free online course called Archiving for the Future: Simple Steps for Archiving Language Documentation Collections, available at https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/. The course is a resource to aid people of all backgrounds in organizing born-digital and digitized language materials and data for deposit into any digital repository (not just AILLA) for long-term preservation and accessibility. 

The course material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1653380 (Susan S. Kung and Anthony C. Woodbury, PIs; September 1, 2016, to August 31, 2020). The course is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. At the moment, the course is available only in English; the next steps are to translate the curriculum into Spanish and Portuguese to make it more accessible to AILLA’s Latin American audience.

Read the full press release in English here: https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2020/09/08/archiving-for-the-future-ailla-launches-free-online-course/

 

AILLA Lanza un Curso Gratuito y en Línea sobre Archivado

El Archivo de los Idiomas Indígenas de Latinoamérica (AILLA) se complace en anunciar el lanzamiento de un curso gratuito en línea llamado Archivar para el Futuro: Pasos Sencillos para Archivar Colecciones de Documentación de Lenguas, disponible en https://archivingforthefuture.teachable.com/. El curso es un recurso para ayudar a las personas de todos los orígenes a organizar materiales y datos lingüísticos digitalizados y de origen digital para depositarlos en cualquier depósito digital (no sólo AILLA) para su conservación y accesibilidad a largo plazo. 

El material del curso se basa en el trabajo apoyado por la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias con la subvención No. BCS-1653380 (Susan S. Kung y Anthony C. Woodbury, PIs; 1 de septiembre de 2016 a 31 de agosto de 2020). El curso está licenciado bajo una licencia internacional Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. Por el momento, el curso está disponible sólo en inglés; los próximos pasos son traducir el currículum al español y al portugués para hacerlo más accesible a la audiencia latinoamericana de AILLA.

Lea el comunicado de prensa en inglés aquí: https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2020/09/08/archiving-for-the-future-ailla-launches-free-online-course/

 

SSILA Archiving Award - CALL EXTENDED

This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archived materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research. 

Deadline: October 15, 2020 

The award is presented to one or more researchers (from any community) who have created an accessible documentary collection of materials relating to an Indigenous language of the Americas. Taking each collection’s context and ethical protocols into account, each collection so honored will be assessed on the following characteristics: 

  • It should be linguistically and/or ethnographically rich. 

  • It should include primary materials, including (but not limited to) field notes, audio or video recordings, and other items created in language documentation. It may also include secondary materials, including (but not limited to) educational materials, analysis of the language, or related media. 

  • It should be diverse in content, including some annotated or transcribed material.  

  • It should be well described through collection-level metadata, item-level metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview which includes how the language community’s priorities have been met. 

  • Its content should be potentially impactful for language learners, language maintenance, language teaching, and scholarly research. 

  • The collection, or a back-up of the collection, should be archived in an established and trusted repository, one that is created and maintained by an institution with a demonstrated commitment to permanence and the long-term preservation of archived resources with suitable rights management practices to allow access to as much of the collections as possible. 

  • Its content should be open and accessible to heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. Accessibility may include a dedicated website that repurposes primary archived material with added value, but a website cannot be nominated. 

This award may be shared by multiple creators of a single collection (including, for example, academic and non-academic researchers, primary language consultants, and collection curators).  The award is given to the creators of the collection, not the repository or archive. Nominations must be made by a member of SSILA. Self-nominations are permitted.  

The nominating package should include: 

  • a letter of nomination identifying the nominee(s) (with curriculum vitae as appropriate), describing the background of their work on the language in question, and the archival collection (with links to online content and metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview), and explaining its quality and significance, and  

  • one supporting letter also explaining the quality and significance of the archival collection. 

If you have questions about the award, please direct them to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org). To submit a nomination for the SSILA Archiving Award, send the nomination and letter of recommendation in PDF format by email to the SSILA Secretary. Please verify that it has in fact been received. 

Nominations should be submitted to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org) by October 15, 2020. 

Norman A. McQuown’s Coatepec Totonac Texts

IJAL Texts Online, vol. 3, number 1, September 2020

Paulette Levy, National Autonomous University of Mexico

This contribution presents three narratives in Coatepec Totonac written by Manuel Oropeza Castro in 1938 in Coatepec, Puebla, and recorded at an audio lab in Mexico City in 1950. They are part of a collection of 36 Coatepec Totonac texts curated by Norman A. McQuown from 1938 to 1968. McQuown’s graphic representation system is based on segmental sandhi phenomena at several levels of the prosodic hierarchy of Coatepec Totonac, so it is quite opaque to a modern reader. In this rendering of the texts, the first line is McQuown’s original phonological representation, followed by a line that shows the boundary segmental phenomena at three levels of the hierarchy, implicit in McQuown’s representation. I then give a modern rendering of the texts in terms of morphosyntactic words, morphologically analyzed and glossed, and a free translation. 

[http://www.americanlinguistics.org/?page_id=2658]

Meet the team behind your new SSILA website!

We would like to introduce you to the team who created the new SSILA website:

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Diego Frankel

Diego is an undergraduate computational linguistics major at the University of Southern California. He is a summer 2020 intern with Mary Linn, the SSILA Secretary/Treasurer, at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH).

He is responsible for the bulk of the work you see (and don’t see) on these pages, and in getting the membership transferred from the old site.

Diego also translated all of the content into Spanish.

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Hali Dardar

Hali is the Language Reclamation and Media Project Coordinator at CFCH. Some of you may have met her at the LSA/CELP closing event for the 2019 Year of Indigenous Languages at the winter meetings in New Orleans, where she was with the Houma Language Project presenting some of their language and culture learning activities.

Hali oversaw Diego in the technical aspects and financial linkings on the new platform.

She kept all of us on track.

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Cecelia Halle

Cecelia is the Strategic Communications Specialist of Cultural Sustainability at CFCH. She worked as an intern on the Smithsonian Mother Tongue Film Festival before joining the staff.

She refreshed our logo, and decided on colors, styles, and images for the new look.

As the granddaughter of Morris Halle, Cecelia is honored that her design skills could be used for SSILA.

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Danny Hieber

And a special thank you to Danny Hieber, former SSILA Webmaster and PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who designed and took care of the old site single-handedly for many years, and who was there for us to answer questions during this transition.

Mary Linn

SSILA Secretary/Treasurer

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections

HELP for Endangered Legacy Collections is a new initiative from within the Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) to assist in the digitization, archiving, and processing of endangered language data. This initiative attempts to tackle two concerns within our field: (1) the fact that many senior researchers nearing retirement need assistance in digitizing, archiving and processing their legacy collections of endangered language data and (2) the fact that there is an increasing number of graduate students who wish to undertake work on endangered languages but are not able to collect their own data due to a variety of reasons, e.g., travel restrictions (especially in the wake of the current global pandemic), lack of funding, family obligations, health concerns, and so on.

Call for Papers 2021 American Name Society

The American Name Society (ANS), a sister society of SSILA, is now inviting proposals for papers for its next annual conference. After serious deliberation of an official proposal made on the 8th of May 2020, the Executive Council of the American Name Society unanimously voted to hold the 2021 Annual Conference online. All presentation sessions will be held online during the four days of the conference. This means that our conference will NOT be held in conjunction with the LSA meeting, which is still slated to be held in January 2021 in San Francisco.

DELAMAN Award

The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN) announces that the deadline for nominations for the DELAMAN Award has been extended to 15 July 2020.

DLI-DEL Position Paper & Petition

The Documenting Endangered Languages (DLI-DEL) Program, now NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure-NEH Documenting Endangered Languages (DLI-DEL), has played a crucial role in the realization of United States federal policy to preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of communities to practice and develop Native languages. For over fifteen years, DLI-DEL has supported projects to advance research and education across many fields of inquiry, providing resources for projects that have strong intellectual merit and broader impacts. However, the recent repositioning of programs within the Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences at the NSF has resulted in the merger of DLI-DEL with Linguistics and the loss of a dedicated program officer, a move which is counter to the NSF’s own strategic plan. This has the potential to exacerbate an already serious threat to information and insight on our collective human cognitive capacity, and to our cultural and historical traditions. This document outlines recommendations for the continuation and growth of DLI-DEL.

Message from the SSILA President - 2021 SSILA Annual Meeting

We hope this email finds you well given the circumstances. We are writing to let you know of our plans for the 2021 conference. SSILA Board members have been in constant communication as events unfold all over the world. After careful consideration we have decided to move our annual conference to a virtual format for this meeting. We are all very concerned about the effects this pandemic has on the populations we are very closely in relationships with, particularly elder Indigenous language speakers. Furthermore, the uncertain and unpredictable circumstances related to travelling, social gatherings and academic (and personal) budgets has led us to believe this is in the best interest of everyone in our society.

Call for Nominations - SSILA Archiving Award, in honor of Michael Krauss

SSILA is pleased to announce a call for nominations for the SSILA Archiving Award in honor of Ken Hale. This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archived materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.