APS Indigenous Language Manuscript Interface

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The rich record of stories, vocabularies, and analyses of Indigenous languages found in archival manuscript collections are critical language infrastructure to advance linguists’ understanding of these languages and Indigenous communities’ goals of cultivating new generations of speakers of Native languages. Yet even when archives digitize these manuscripts, they face new challenges as they look to make the information within these under-utilized documents easier to examine and use in a digital setting for multiple audiences. The Indigenous Language Manuscript Interface (ILMI) project will contribute new solutions to this widespread issue in linguistics and archiving through a collaboration between the oldest language archive in the United States, the American Philosophical Society (APS), and the Language and Cultural Revitalization Program of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana (TBT). The ILMI project will create a new open-source platform that can be hosted by archives themselves, allowing researchers to navigate and view digitized original pages of manuscripts in endangered languages alongside data of the original text and data added by linguists and community language experts. To develop a pilot example of this platform, this project focuses on the 1930s Tunica language notebooks of the influential linguist Mary Haas and the last fluent Tunica speaker, Sesostrie Youchigant. These notebooks constitute the largest set of Tunica language documentation ever created. The TBT’s language experts and apprentices will produce transcriptions, transliterations, and additional information, integrating community expertise into the project and providing opportunities for language apprentices to expand their training. A TEI-encoded initial version of the interface will be produced by the end of Year 1. In Year 2, the lead linguist will create thorough analyses, annotations, and multimedia resource enhancements in collaboration with the TBT, leading to a finished Tunica language portal hosted by the APS. APS archivists will demonstrate the broader application of this new framework to digitized presentations of thousands of pages manuscripts in dozens of other Native languages, creating linked content guides to help all audiences explore these resources. The APS will provide the Tunica data produced by the project as open data sets available to researchers. It will also promote the ILMI framework for broader adoption by other language archives, and by linguists seeking to enhance the usability of archival manuscripts with their own contributions.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.