Models for Building Relationships and Refining Approaches for Collaborating with Indigenous Communities: Reporting on Five Years of Online Work with the Nuer.

Models for Building Relationships and Refining Approaches for Collaborating with Indigenous Communities: Reporting on Five Years of Online Work with the Nuer.

Presentation given by Tatiana Reid at the Language Documentation and Archiving conference on the 5. October 2022 at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

I report on my experience of working with the Nuer-speaking community. Nuer is a little studied West Nilotic language of South Sudan and Ethiopia. Over the past five years I have carried description, documentation and language development exclusively online through social media such as Messenger and WhatsApp, and more recently, via Zoom.

I will highlight various aspects of this mode of work, showing what is possible to achieve working remotely and the practicalities of doing so. These include, but are not limited to: utilising google documents when working on recorded narratives with reference speakers; and collecting data using a hybrid mode where the researcher (online) and a community member (in-person) conduct interviews with speakers producing high quality recordings. I will also draw on my experience of outsourced documentation – where audio and video recordings are made by local organisations in East Africa. I will touch on the experience (together with the colleagues at the University of Surrey) of working towards literacy development. This work involved creating databases that the community members populated with data collected via our ‘Nuer Lexicon’ Facebook group; and running an online Nuer literacy development workshops attended by over 30 community members from South Sudan, Ethiopia and from around the world.

I claim that the prerequisite for conducting remote work with a language community is the collaborative approach between the researchers and the speakers of the language, which places greater emphasis on the 1) ability of the community members to to carry out data collection and processing and 2) continuity. My experience shows that ELDP/ELAR’s advice for field linguists to strengthen capacity building within language communities is gaining even more relevance in the predominantly virtually connected world.