Seven Dimensions of Portability for Language Documentation and Description

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2977141
AutoresSteven Bird (0000-0003-3782-7733, The University of Melbourne), Gary Simons (0000-0002-9858-4088, SIL International)
Año2003
Volumen79
Número3
Páginas557-582
Fecha de publicación2003-09-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLanguage (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2003.0149
OpenAlexW2062639350
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas43
Referencias citadas13

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. Consequently, new digital language resources of all kinds-lexicons, interlinear texts, grammars, language maps, field notes, recordings-are proving 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 review existing software tools and digital technologies for language documentation and description, and analyze portability problems in the seven areas of CONTENT, FORMAT, DISCOVERY, ACCESS, CITATION, PRESERVATION, and RIGHTS. We articulate the values that underlie our intuitions about good and bad practices, and lay out an extensive set of recommendations to serve as a starting point for the community-wide discussion that we envisage

Annotation · Data science · Documentation · Field (mathematics) · Process (computing) · Programming language · Reuse · Set (abstract data type) · Software portability · World Wide Web · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Digital Rights Management and Security · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Software