Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition: A Labor of Love

ABSTRACT

Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition (BDLT) has been one of the longest-running Slavic digital humanities projects in the United States. Initially conceived in 2008 as a series of printed volumes, the digital project was built upon the foundation of a long-term international collaboration dating to the 1970s. As BDLT nears completion in 2019, this paper reflects on the trajectory of its development and its sustainability as an unfunded digital humanities project, and the ways it can serve as both a model and cautionary tale for others who seek to undertake similar work.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital humanities
• digital preservation
• content management systems
• dialectology
• Bulgarian language

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Ronelle Alexander and Vladimir Zhobov, eds., Revitalizing Bulgarian Dialectology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hc6x8hp.

2 Andrew Dombrowski, and Quinn Dombrowski, “An XML-Based Approach to Dialectological Data: The Development of Syllabic Liquids in Bulgarian” (paper, The 17th Balkan and South Slavic Conference, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, April 2010), http://quinndombrowski.com/blog/2010/04/13/bulgarian-dialect-atlas-at-the-17th-balkan-and-south-slavic-conference.

3 Insitut za bǎlgarski ezik. Bǎlgarski dialekten atlas I-IV (Sofia: Izdatelstvo na Bălgarska akademia na naukite, 1964–1981).

4 Quinn Dombrowski, “Drupal and Other Content Management Systems,” in Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training and Research, eds. C. Crompton, R. J. Lane, and R. Siemens (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016).

5 Dries Buytaert, “Backwards Compatibility,” https://dri.es/backward-compatibility (accessed May 17, 2006).

6 Ronelle Alexander, and Quinn Dombrowski, “Digital Humanities Development without Developers: Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition” (paper, 2014 Proceedings of DH-CASE II, DocEng workshop). doi: 10.1145/2657480.2657481.

7 Miriam Posner, “Here and There: Creating DH Community,” http://miriamposner.com/blog/here-and-there-creating-dh-community/ (accessed September 18, 2014).

8 Jennifer Vinopal, and Monica McCormick, “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability,” Journal of Library Administration 53, 1 (2013): 27–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2013.756689.

9 Sarah Kalikman Lippincott, “Digital Scholarship at Harvard: Current Practices, Opportunities, and Ways Forward,” https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/dsi/files/harvard_ds_final-report_20170627_v2.pdf (accessed June 27, 2017).

10 “Drupal Schema – Why this methodology?” https://www.drupal.org/forum/general/general-discussion/2011-01-21/drupal-schema-why-this-methodology (accessed January 21, 2011).

11 Dries Buytaert, “Why the big architectural changes in Drupal 8?” https://dri.es/why-the-big-architectural-changes-in-drupal-8 (accessed September 9, 2013).

12 Bibliography module – Issues – Drupal 8 port, March 20, 2015. Drupal module issue queue. See https://www.drupal.org/project/biblio/issues/2456591.

13 Editview module – Issues – D7 port of Editview, April 7, 2010. Drupal module issue queue. See https://www.drupal.org/project/editview/issues/764882.

14 Spencer Keralis, “Disrupting Labor in Digital Humanities; or, The Classroom Is Not Your Crowd,” in Disrupting the Digital Humanities, ed. Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel (New York, NY: Punctum Books, 2018).

15 Katrina Anderson, Lindsey Bannister, Janey Dodd, et alia, “Student Labour and Training in Digital Humanities,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2016), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/1/000233/000233.html.

16 Haley Di Pressi, Stephanie Gorman, Miriam Posner, et alia, “A Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights,” UCLA HumTech, June 8, 2015, https://humtech.ucla.edu/news/a-student-collaborators-bill-of-rights/.

17 “What is the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program?” http://urap.berkeley.edu/program-intro.

18 See decal courses for Spring 2019, https://decal.berkeley.edu/courses.

19 Vladimir Zhobov, “New Approaches to Bulgarian Dialectal Vocalism,” and Ronelle Alexander, “Bulgarian Dialectal Accent, A New Approach,” are essays slated to be published in the forthcoming monograph by Alexander and Zhobov: Bulgarian Dialects, Living Speech in the Digital Age.

20 Dries Buytaert, “Drupal 7, 8 and 9,” https://dri.es/drupal-7-8-and-9 (accessed September 12, 2018).