Less-Networked Speaker Communities and Digital Language Archives

Fieldwork, description, and preservation of research results are often seen as endpoints of language documentation projects. Although archives are doing their best to ensure that source communities can ultimately gain access to the language materials they produce, little is being done to facilitate their involvement in the ongoing curation of those materials. Enhancing and extending such involvement will significantly increase both the scholarly value of documented materials and its impact in source communities. Using the situations of rural Papua New Guinea and Cameroon as model cases, this project will bring together an international group of scholars, technical experts, and community members for a two day conference to intensively explore appropriate "bridging" technologies and make recommendations to help digital language archives overcome fundamental obstacles to maintaining direct, ongoing relationships with archive stakeholders who reside in less-networked communities.