The 27th annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Symposium will be held June 14-18, 2021 at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada on the lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
As a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, SILS27 will be taking place fully online in 2021.
SILS27will be hosted jointly by Queen’s University; Tsi Tyonnheht Onkwawenna Lanaguage and Cultural Centre, Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory; and Kingston Indigenous Languages Nest (KILN) a part of the urban Indigenous community of Kingston, ON.
SILS27 will focus on global perspectives of Indigenous Language Revitalization, as reflected in the Symposium title, “Global Indigeneity: Language from the Four Directions.” In addition to bringing together voices from around the globe, this theme is inspired by the four directions teachings for understanding health and community in holistic perspective, encompassing the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. With this in mind, the Program Committee has identified four broad topic areas:
Physical – Technologies and products for language revitalization
Mental – Insights and innovations in revitalization research
Emotional – Community connections for revitalization
Spiritual – Creative arts and language revitalization
For more information about the logistics and format of the conference, we invite you to visit the conference logistics page on our website, or to stop by the Social Rooms and Help Desk space on Zoom, which will be open throughout the conference. All Zoom links are available here on Sched—we ask that you don’t share them with anyone not registered for the conference, but anyone is welcome to register late for the conference, and will get access to Sched within 24 hours of registering.
For many Indigenous language communities, handwritten records constitute one important source of linguistic and cultural information for language reclamation and revitalization (Stebbins & Hellwig 2010, Baldwin et al. 2016, Lukaniec et al. 2021). While such materials may serve a vital role in bridging between the knowledge of previous generations and the goals of present-day communities, drawing on their contents often requires documents to be manually transcribed, which can present a time-consuming and costly barrier to their creative use in local language initiatives. At the same time, handwritten sources also pose a range of challenges for current digital methods and tools in language documentation, which have tended to focus on working with audiovisual, rather than written, records of language practices and knowledge. In this presentation, we share our experiences in the context of Indigenous language revitalization and documentation with two freely available, cloud-based software tools that aim to improve the accessibility of handwritten documents. In both tools, scans of handwritten documents are presented through a web-based interface to invited contributors to transcribe, correct, and interpret, aligning text and commentary with the scanned image at either the page or sentence level. We discuss in practical terms what is required to use both systems (in terms of software requirements, document formats, and training); how features of both tools have assisted in recent collaborative projects involving historical handwritten Indigenous language materials; and how transcribed documents can be shared and brought into other language initiatives. While collaborative document transcription tools such as these are not yet common in Indigenous language revitalization and documentation, we suggest that they may serve a valuable role in this context, helping both to open up handwritten language materials' contents to a broader range of uses and to facilitate the involvement of a wider community of contributors in language work.
References
Baldwin, Daryl, David J. Costa & Douglas Troy. 2016. Myaamiaataweenki eekincikoonihkiinki eeyoonki aapisaataweenki: A Miami language digital tool for language reclamation. Language Documentation and Conservation 10. 394—410. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24713. Lukaniec, Megan, Sally Cartwright, Martin Holmes, Erin Hashimoto, Emma Pearce-Marvell, Jamie Quibell & Bethany Scholfield. 2021. Using open-source, sustainable tools for language reclamation: Preliminary findings from building a digital corpus of Wendat. Paper given at the 7th International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC7), University of Hawai ªi at MaÃÑnoa, online, March 4—7, 2021. https://youtu.be/1A0G-kG79m4. Stebbins, Tonya N. & Birgit Hellwig. 2010. Principles and practicalities of corpus design in language retrieval: Issues in the digitization of the Beynon corpus of early twentieth-century Sm'algyax materials. Language Documentation and Conservation 4. 34—59. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/4466.
