LSA 2011 Sessions on Metadata in Language Documentation and Description

At the recent annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Pittsburgh Jeff Good of University at Buffalo and I organised a tutorial session (Friday 7th January, 1.5 hours) and poster session (Sunday 9th January, 3 hours) on the topic of metadata in language documentation and description.

The 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.

Jeff and I are able to bring together field linguists, computational linguists, language archivists, anthropologists, and archaeologists to discuss the issue of metadata from an interdisciplinary perspective. The poster session included presentations of a number of archives of endangered languages materials and displayed their approaches to metadata.

One thing that became clear from the presentations and posters was that early work in language documentation starting around ten years ago was heavily influenced by library concepts (eg. Dublin Core), and that key metadata notions were interoperability, standardisation, discovery, and access (see, eg. OLAC, E-MELD, Farrar & Langendoen 2003 [pdf]). Today, however, we see more focus on expressivity and individuality in metadata descriptions that researchers are creating, and increasing emphasis on protocols, meta-documentation (documentation of the documentation itself), greater clarity on stakeholder rights and responsibilities, and more diverse ways in which researchers are creating and manipulating their metadata. There seems to be plenty of interest in the topic now too — over 70 people attended the tutorial session and the posters attracted a lot of interest.

The abstracts, talks and posters are available for download here and there are blog posts about the sessions by Laura Welcher (including a subtitled video) and Ryan Dewey.

1 thought on “LSA 2011 Sessions on Metadata in Language Documentation and Description”

Here at Endangered Languages and Cultures, we fully welcome your opinion, questions and comments on any post, and all posts will have an active comments form. However if you have never commented before, your comment may take some time before it is approved. Subsequent comments from you should appear immediately.

We will not edit any comments unless asked to, or unless there have been html coding errors, broken links, or formatting errors. We still reserve the right to censor any comment that the administrators deem to be unnecessarily derogatory or offensive, libellous or unhelpful, and we have an active spam filter that may reject your comment if it contains too many links or otherwise fits the description of spam. If this happens erroneously, email the author of the post and let them know. And note that given the huge amount of spam that all WordPress blogs receive on a daily basis (hundreds) it is not possible to sift through them all and find the ham.

In addition to the above, we ask that you please observe the Gricean maxims:

*Be relevant: That is, stay reasonably on topic.

*Be truthful: This goes without saying; don’t give us any nonsense.

*Be concise: Say as much as you need to without being unnecessarily long-winded.

*Be perspicuous: This last one needs no explanation.

We permit comments and trackbacks on our articles. Anyone may comment. Comments are subject to moderation, filtering, spell checking, editing, and removal without cause or justification.

All comments are reviewed by comment spamming software and by the site administrators and may be removed without cause at any time. All information provided is volunteered by you. Any website address provided in the URL will be linked to from your name, if you wish to include such information. We do not collect and save information provided when commenting such as email address and will not use this information except where indicated. This site and its representatives will not be held responsible for errors in any comment submissions.

Again, we repeat: We reserve all rights of refusal and deletion of any and all comments and trackbacks.

Leave a Comment