Presentations

Abstract

In many areas of the world, language archives are being created, containing information on endangered languages, adhering to sophisticated metadata schemes and archiving standards. The data deposited in these archives, however, is as of yet hard to access, especially for community members who might be easily frustrated when trying to access data. In the DoBeS archive, there are various ways of searching and browsing through the deposited data, allowing for sophisticated queries targeting information in the metadata or annotations, so that expert users can work with the language documentations. However, this user-interface is too complex for a visitor that has not been thoroughly introduced to the structures and it is difficult to find results that may satisfy typical community members’ interests. As a shortcut for users from the community, a community portal has been created which displays an array of traditionally relevant topics in a simple and attractive way and links to resources in the archive. Topics include traditional and personal stories, procedurals and traditional activities. It is suitable for school use and due to its topical structure, may also serve as a base for developing teaching materials. In the community portal, a number of pre-defined searches have been set up for certain resource categories. These categories are marked in the metadata, so whenever a metadata file is uploaded into the archive containing one of these values, it will automatically become part of the search results in the portal. The query to the metadata database is made possible through a so-called REST interface. Via this protocol, the metadata search can be accessed as a web service within any other dynamic web content management framework. This search technology could also be used to implement a portal for a broader audience, introducing the archive from various angles to different potential user groups. Here too, the dynamic searches guarantee a low maintenance effort once the portal has been created. And finally, we will show additional ways to represent archived data (e. g. using Google Earth layers), in order to draw a comprehensive picture of the various ways to enter the DoBeS archive and efficiently access relevant information. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to bridging the gap between the creation of comprehensive language documentation and community efforts at revitalization, and help researchers to fulfill their ethical commitment to make data as accessible as possible.

Abstract

The repository of the MPI contains different types of linguistic material: the DOBES endangered languages archive, the ESF second learner corpus, the Dutch Spoken National Corpus, MPI's gesture corpora, MPI acquisition corpora and MPI language documentations of the language and cognition research group. The archive covers more than 200.000 objects, mostly organized in sessions that are described with the IMDI-based metadata descriptions. Mostly, these sessions contain digitized audio/video signals and layers of annotations. In general access to these resources is limited and can be made available upon request. The Language Archiving Technology (LAT) is meant to contribute to the archive infrastructure. It focuses on open accessibility of the language resources; it supports dynamic and continuously enriched collections according to the Live Archives ideas; it stresses the need for long-term archiving of our digital collections covering unique martial about languages that will probably be extinct in a few decades and it follows the trend towards service oriented architectures. LAT components consist of data management and ingestion tools (IMDI, LAMUS and AMS) and of archive enrichment and visualization tools (ELAN, ANNEX and LEXUS). The tools are being developed and maintained by the Technical Group of the MPI. All LAT products are or will become available under an Open Source license and will be available free-of-charge in academic research.