Abstract:
There are at least 7,000 languages in the world and a great
deal of the knowledge that is reflected in these languages
is at risk of being lost. While, in the past, this has been a
colonial enterprise, only of benefit to the outsider researcher,
more recently there is a change in practice that focuses on
collaboration and partnership with speakers of these languages.
The new challenge is how to provide longevity for their work.
One form of redress is to find and digitize all the records that
have been made, thus preserving them, and to make them
available for the speakers and their communities. The Pacific
and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered
Cultures (PARADISEC) holds a collection of nearly 150 terabytes,
representing 1,310 languages. I will present recent work on
visualizing what is now known and how these new methods
can be more responsive to community needs.
