5. Verificación final de todos los elementos
4.3 Montaje
To access this related information efficiently, fieldworkers maintain a maximally informative naming system for each product; for example, names of digitalfiles
could include the following information: [Language Identifier]-[YearMonthDay of file creation]-[Initials of the file creator]-[Recording device/notebook#]-[Transcription/annotation software used in creating thefile]-[Description of the file contents]. Each product is also recorded in a metadata database, which provides a way to standardize catalog information so that it is easily searched and included in a larger language archive. Archiving data in accessible reposito-ries (not just the researcher’s private computer) is necessary so that materials are backed up and accessible to the linguistic community, native speakers, and future generations.
A metadata database will include a selection of the following types of informa-tion for each piece of data generated fromfieldwork: unique identifier (often the file name), language identifier (often the Ethnologue code), date of creation, creator (researcher’s name), description, contributor (speaker’s name or pseudo-nym/code), title of product (such as the name given to a conversation, e.g., Raja talks about festivals), format (e.g., .wav, .pdf), rights of access, length offile, genre of product, place recorded, relatedfiles, and location of product. It will also ideally include cross-references amongfiles and materials, such as transcripts and match-ing audio or videofiles, to allow easy processing of complex field material.
All recordings and copies of notes should be saved in multiple locations, following what Austin (2006: 89) calls LOCKSS, i.e., “lots of copies keep stuff safe.”
8 Endangered language documentation and language description
It is useful, in theory, to distinguishfieldwork that leads to language description, described above, fromfieldwork that leads to language documenta-tion (Himmelmann2006). Fieldwork toward documentation is motivated by the need to preserve the unique and quickly disappearing linguistic practices of a speech community. The urgency of the task motivates certain distinct method-ologies and practices in thefield. For example, the Summer Institute of Linguistics uses Basic Oral Language Documentation (BOLD), which trainsfieldworkers to quickly record as many language samples as possible in a short amount of time.
Transcription time is reduced by having a speaker repeat recorded speech slowly into a recorder, with a first pass of morphological and syntactic annotation conducted away from thefield. The collection process can be sped up even further by training speakers to record and then“orally” transcribe (record repetition in slow speech) what has been recorded (see Reiman2010). In documentary lin-guistics, the important outcome is to create documentation that can be universally shared and accessed in perpetuity. To this end, the field has introduced useful standards in how digital technologies are used to record, annotate, and archive language data. These standards have been adopted by descriptivefieldworkers
because descriptivefield linguists often also work on endangered languages, and because they too need to build and annotate language corpora. The concerns and approaches of documentation and description also come together in that endangered language documentation often includes parallel work on language preservation and maintenance, which requires materials that can be mined for pedagogical purposes. Descriptive linguists may similarly produce materials such as reference grammars, annotated text collections, and dictionaries, which can be mined for pedagogical use. One can easily make an argument for documentation (recording the language) without description (analyzing the language with speaker input): consider what we have been able to learn from the Sumerian manuscripts without the assistance of Sumerian scribes. But documentation with description is ideal. (How much more could we have learned with the input of scribes!) To this end, we see more and more that descriptive and documentary projects involve teams of linguists and speakers who strive to document, describe, archive, and preserve with due urgency.
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