Interrogating the Archive: Assessing digital language repositories as technology

The digital language repository is a relatively new technology. Seen as a key aspect of documentary approaches to linguistics, digital repositories serve to protect the linguistic (and,at the same time, cultural) resources of a community, often for both scientific inquiry and local use, and usually long into the future. Given their stated importance, this talk seeks to explore the digital language repository as a technology in a holistic and critical manner. This is carried out by: 1) examining my own experience creating and curating archive collections of audiovisual language material from three language communities in north-central Tanzania; 2) examining these archive collections through a set of questions attributed to Jacques Ellul; and 3) suggesting future visions of digital repositories alive to the needs and desires of the local communities whose voices they preserve.