Born Archival: The Ebb and Flow of Digital Documents from the Field

Abstract

Facilitated by an infusion of funding from philanthropic sources, descriptive linguists have been galvanized to document the world's languages before they disappear without record. Linguists have responded to the “crisis of documentation” (Dobrin, L. M. & Berson, J. (2011), “Speakers and Language Documentation”, in The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages, P. K. Austin & J. Sallabank (eds), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 187–211) by entering into increasingly collaborative partnerships with speech communities, producing “documents” that have both local relevance and academic integrity. The growth in access to digital recording technology has meant that contemporary research initiatives on endangered languages are not only born digital, but often birthed straight into an archive. Yet heritage collections of recordings made by ethnographers and linguists in the past are ever more endangered, becoming orphaned when their collectors die or fragmented into their component parts based on the medium of documentation when they are finally archived. Drawing on fieldwork in Nepal with a community speaking an endangered Tibeto–Burman language, and reflecting on the decade I have spent directing a digital humanities research initiative—the Digital Himalaya Project—I discuss how linguists and anthropologists are collecting, protecting and connecting their data, and how technology influences their relationship to documents.

Keywords:

• Archives
• Endangered Languages
• Documents
• Digitization
• Himalayas

Notes

Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen (DoBeS) archive can be found online here http://corpus1.mpi.nl/, last accessed on Thursday, 27 January 2011.

See http://elar.soas.ac.uk/, last accessed on Thursday, 27 January 2011.

For a discussion of this process in Nepal and Northern India, see Shneiderman (2010).

The ethnonym of choice for the ethnic group and their language is Thangmi, but the nation state of Nepal recognises them by the exonym Thami, which is also the official spelling of their last name. Both terms—Thangmi and Thami—are in use, although I have more recently opted for the former as it more accurately reflects the desires of the majority of the speech community.

See http://www.pathwaysproject.org, last accessed on Monday, 31 January 2011.

On its website http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/.

The grant was routed through the Royal Anthropological Institute in the United Kingdom, to whom we remain very grateful.

See Nordstrom (1993) for a discussion of the pornographic overtones of some early ethnographic photography.

See Macfarlane (2010) for a discussion of the unique breadth and depth of von Fürer-Haimendorf's films.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content on a trusted digital archive of more than one thousand academic journals.

Online at http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals.

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