APS Indigenous Language Manuscript Interface

在档案手稿收藏中发现的丰富的土著语言故事、词汇和分析记录是促进语言学家对这些语言的理解和土著社区培养新一代土著语言使用者的目标的关键语言基础。然而，即使档案馆将这些手稿数字化，他们也面临着新的挑战，因为他们希望使这些未充分利用的文件中的信息更容易在数字环境中为多个受众进行检查和使用。土著语言手稿接口（ILMI）项目将通过美国最古老的语言档案馆，美国哲学学会（APS）和路易斯安那州突尼卡-比洛克西部落语言和文化复兴计划（TBT）之间的合作，为语言学和档案中这一广泛存在的问题提供新的解决方案。ILMI项目将创建一个新的开源平台，可以由档案本身托管，使研究人员能够浏览和查看濒危语言手稿的数字化原始页面，以及原始文本数据和语言学家和社区语言专家添加的数据。为了开发这个平台的试点例子，该项目将重点放在20世纪30年代有影响力的语言学家玛丽·哈斯和最后一个流利的图尼察语使用者Sesostrie Youchigant的图尼察语笔记本上。这些笔记本构成了有史以来最大的图尼卡语文档集。TBT的语言专家和学徒将提供转录、音译和其他信息，将社区专业知识整合到项目中，并为语言学徒提供扩大培训的机会。一个tei编码的接口的初始版本将在第一学年结束时制作。在第二年，首席语言学家将与TBT合作创建全面的分析，注释和多媒体资源增强功能，从而完成由APS托管的图尼卡语言门户网站。APS档案管理员将展示这一新框架的更广泛应用，以数十种其他本土语言的数千页手稿进行数字化展示，创建链接内容指南，帮助所有受众探索这些资源。APS将把该项目产生的Tunica数据作为开放数据集提供给研究人员。它还将促进其他语言档案更广泛地采用ILMI框架，并由语言学家寻求通过自己的贡献来提高档案手稿的可用性。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。

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.