Workshop on Endangered Language Data Preservation: The Need for Standards, June 21-24, 2001, Santa Barbara, California

语言学专业的成员面临着两个紧迫的情况：世界上的语言数量正在迅速减少，而由于网络技术的可用性和复杂性不断提高，语言数据数字化的举措数量正在迅速增加。面对前者，后者似乎是一种纯粹的好处，但如果档案管理员、现场语言学家和语言工程师之间没有充分的合作，事情可能会在两种情况下出错。首先，语言数据数字化的通用标准可能永远无法达成一致；由此产生的归档实践和语言表示的变化将严重抑制数据访问、搜索和跨语言比较。其次，标准的制定可能不需要最了解人类语言描述性语言学家的结构可能性范围的人的指导，而这些语言学家对描述性较差的语言进行了实地考察。面对广泛的语言磨损和丢失，基于西方知名语言设计的元语言或元数据指南不足以满足归档尽可能多的语言数据的紧迫任务。如果语言档案馆要提供尽可能广泛的数据访问并以最有用的形式提供数据，就必须就档案基础设施的某些方面达成共识。这是一个为期 3 天的研讨会的拟议主题，该研讨会将与美国语言学会 2001 年夏季学院联合举办，届时将有经验丰富的现场语言学家、计算语言学家和语言档案管理员参加。研讨会的目的是将实地语言学家和计算语言学家聚集在一起，以实现两个主要目标：（1）让彼此了解实地语言学家和计算语言学家在建立濒危语言数据档案时预期面临的截然不同的挑战，以及（2）征求有关档案基础设施两个基本要素的建议：文本标记和元数据。

Members of the linguistics profession are faced with two urgent situations: the number of languages in the world is rapidly diminishing while the number of initiatives to digitize language data is rapidly multiplying as a result of the increasing availability and sophistication of web technology. The latter might seem to be an unalloyed good in the face of the former, but there are two ways things may go wrong without adequate collaboration among archivists, field linguists, and language engineers. First, a common standard for the digitization of linguistic data may never be agreed upon; and the resulting variation in archiving practices and language representation would seriously inhibit data access, searching, and cross-linguistic comparison. Second, standards may be set without guidance from the people who best know the range of structural possibilities in human language-descriptive linguists who have done fieldwork on poorly described languages. Metalanguage or metadata guidelines which are designed on the basis of well-known western languages will not be adequate to the urgent task of archiving as much linguistic data as possible in the face of widespread language attrition and loss.If linguistic archives are to offer the widest possible access to the data and provide it in a maximally useful form, consensus must be reached about certain aspects of archive infrastructure. This is the proposed topic of a 3-day workshop which will be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America 2001 Summer Institute and will involve experienced field linguists, computational linguists, and language archivists. The objective of the workshop is to bring field linguists and computational linguists together with two primary goals: (1) to educate one other about the very different challenges field linguists and computational linguists anticipate in the establishment of an archive for endangered language data, and (2) to solicit recommendations about two essential elements of archive infrastructure: text markup and metadata.