Insights from 25 Years of Co-creative Training in Language Documentation and Revitalization

Presented at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 by Jordan Lachler, Nicholas Bunderson-Toler, Timothy Mills, Lex Giesbrecht, Darren Flavelle, Craig Kopris and Marianne Huijsmans. The field of Language Documentation has innovated quickly in recent years to facilitate more work being done remotely. There has also been a focus in the last decade for this work to be led by the language communities themselves. For the past two years, we have used newly developed tools made with the express purpose of enabling language communities to create a corpus with less input from outsider linguists. These tools are based on traditional documentary activities, including translation, picture description, conversation prompts, and free-form narratives. This Presentation will focus on the surprises and challenges we have encountered in training two communities – one in North America, one in Melanesia – to use the tools the way that we intended. Despite the user-friendly design of the tools, low levels of technological literacy among certain community members created an initial barrier to their participation in the project. This was mitigated through a two-tiered training model which relied on more tech savvy community members to provide hands-on training in the local language. Once they began using the tools, members of the different communities interpreted the activities from their own perspectives – sometimes prefering to carry out tasks collaboratively, striving for uniformity in their responses, and at other times using the activities to express their linguistic creativity and individuality in ways we could not have anticipated. These new emic perspectives on how the tools should best be used enriched the documentation; though that did lead to a loss of uniformity in the data collection phase and additional unforeseen work for the linguists and communities on the back end. We aim to showcase these new tools and discuss how we are improving them with the input from the communities in order to prepare them for wider distribution.