Conference: Understanding the Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts of Fifteen Years of U.S. Federal Funding for Documenting Endangered Languages

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This project will bring together scholars, students, and community members representing language documentation research projects funded by the National Science Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Documenting Endangered Languages Program (DEL) in order to participate in three organized sessions at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Since its inception in 2003, DEL has funded hundreds of institutes and conferences, fellowships, and doctoral dissertations. In addition to "standard" documentation projects, increasingly, projects have come to include cross-disciplinary collaboration benefitting language revitalization and teaching, and community collaboration and capacity-building. These events will offer the opportunity for both reflection on significant achievements from DEL projects in the past fifteen years, and also for discussion about what directions documentation, archival preservation, and revitalization projects should take for the future. These events will allow participants to demonstrate how the science of documentation research can be co-constructed, from project conception, through to methods, and on to outputs, via considering indigenous interpretations and knowledge. The events will also allow participants to share how their documentation research has facilitated construction of sustainable community collaborations and educational opportunities, and fostered the rethinking of power distribution in situations of community involvement in documentation research. Broader impacts include the cross-pollination of ideas from different disciplinary perspectives, the potential for increased participation by Native Hawaiians, Alaska Natives and American Indians, historically underrepresented groups in linguistics, and the evaluation of the impact of federal funding from two distinct agencies in terms of intellectual merit and broader impacts, merit review criteria at NSF determined by the National Science Board.These events are scheduled to coincide with and complement LSA-organized celebrations of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages. Led by two NSF DEL award holders, the events will provide a platform for case studies of demonstrating the relevance of documentation research to science more generally, and also how funded projects provide training opportunities for community members, and members' roles in valuable resource creation. Importantly, the project will support the attendance of students and community partners, allowing for multiple viewpoints and perspectives about shaping and conducting documenting research for, by, and with language communities. The methodology employed will include pre-event dialogue between participants and project leaders to shape presentations and discussions according to project goals, and will also include allotted time during the events for audience-participant interaction. The outcomes of this project will articulate and promote community-based approaches toward the conceptualization and carryout of future documentation research. The participant collaborators will disseminate recommendations and best practices for community-oriented documentation research, and through post-conference publications, they will also provide examples and resources for future project directors and those with whom they partner.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.