Methods and Results in Language Documentation using Literary Digital Editions

殖民时期的档案给学者们提出了一系列方法论上的挑战。一方面，它们包含了有关前欧洲和早期殖民时期土著语言、历史和社会的宝贵信息。另一方面，这些文件往往是由宗教和政治官员写的，他们试图改变或根除他们所描述的传统。为了解决这个众所周知的问题，学者们必须找到方法，将殖民干预从土著语言、历史和文化数据中分离出来。这个项目提供了一个这样的解决方案。该项目与社区的土著学者合作，使用开源、符合标准的工具，建立了五个版本的数字收藏，其中包括1492年以前美洲最长、最完整的书籍。通过展示土著和非土著作者在不同时间以不同方式记录词汇、句法结构和形态，该项目生成了一个语料库和方法，可应用于其他语言和历史背景，包括未来的教育工作。由于关于数字材料对遗产学习者和非遗产使用者习得土著语言的有效性的数据很少，因此该项目为未来的研究创造了重要的材料。该项目将文本编码倡议组织（TEI）开发的文本编码国际学术标准应用于1492年之前最长、最完整的书籍，以使其在征服中幸存下来。其他数字项目则以手抄本的形式呈现文本，这种格式非专家无法使用，不容易用于语言学习，并且优先考虑殖民时代的书写行为，而不是原始的口头传统。相比之下，这个项目的五项数字收藏，包括历史和现代文本、视频和翻译，由土著学者与非土著教师和学生研究人员合作开发，使用编码工具揭示殖民干预，并突出土著学者对正字法、形态语法和词汇的更正。这些工具包括引用字符串分析属性（用于标记文本中的字符、位置和对象）、空间元素（用于保留诗意口头性并根据形态平行性和短语最终标记对齐概念）和注释（通过包含880个文化主题的关系数据库管理），以呈现文本段落、语音和语法的竞争性学术解释)。这个集合被放置在一个使用开源静态站点生成器框架的平台上，以避免基于服务器的网站的长时间加载时间，与渐进式Web应用程序框架相结合，为移动读者提供类似应用程序的体验，而不牺牲手机存储空间。这种历史文本分析的数字人文方法允许各种用户，包括研究人员、教师、学生和感兴趣的公众成员，以无法通过印刷传播的方式表示语料库和代码。因此，它为母语人士、传统学习者、非母语研究人员和学生的语言学习、文本分析和语言研究创造了一个新的工具。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Colonial archives present a range of methodological challenges for scholars. On the one hand, they contain valuable information about Indigenous languages, histories, and societies in the Pre-European and early colonial periods. On the other hand, these documents are often written by religious and political officials who sought to change or eradicate the traditions they described. To address this well-known problem, scholars must develop methods that disentangle colonial interventions from Indigenous linguistic, historical, and cultural data. This project offers one such solution. In collaboration with Indigenous scholars from the community, this project uses open source, standards-compliant tools to build a digital collection of five versions of the longest and most complete pre-1492 book of the Americas. By showing where Indigenous and non-Native authors record vocabularies, syntactic structures, and morphologies in different ways and at different moments, this project generates a corpus and methodology that can be applied to other linguistic and historical contexts, including future educational efforts. Because there is little data on the effectiveness of digital materials on Indigenous language acquisition for heritage learners and non-heritage speakers, this project creates important materials for future research.This project applies the international, scholarly standards of textual encoding developed by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to the longest and most complete pre-1492 book to survive the conquest. Other digital projects represent the text in manuscript facsimiles, a format that is inaccessible to non-experts, cannot easily be used for language learning, and privileges the colonial-era act of writing rather than the original oral tradition. In contrast, this project’s five-item digital collection of historical and modern texts, videos, and translations, developed by Indigenous scholars in collaboration with non-Native faculty and student researchers, uses encoding tools to reveal colonial interventions and highlight Indigenous scholars’ corrections to orthography, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. These tools include referencing string analytical attributes rs ana to tag characters, places, and objects in the text, the space element to preserve poetic orality and align concepts according to morphological parallelism and phrase-final markers, and annotations, managed through a relational database of 880 cultural topics, to present competing scholarly interpretations of textual passages, phonetics, and syntax. The collection is housed on a platform that uses an open-source Static Site Generator framework to avoid the long loading time of server-based websites, paired with a Progressive Web Application framework to provide mobile readers with an app-like experience that does not sacrifice phone storage. This digital humanities approach to historical textual analytics allows a variety of users, including researchers, teachers, students, and interested members of the public, to represent the corpus and code in ways that cannot be disseminated through print. In so doing it creates a new tool for language learning, textual analysis, and linguistic study by native speakers, heritage learners, and non-Native researchers and students.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.