Digital humanities and language documentation

Abstract

Language documentation is aligning linguistic methods with those more generally being adopted by Digital Humanists. Language documentation can be seen as delivering a new kind of postmodern linguistics by acknowledging the partiality of the data on which an analysis is based, and in explicitly inserting the linguist into the process of recording, annotating and preparing the corpus for scrutiny by others. Paradoxically, it is this kind of scientific method that also connects with other humanities disciplines under the rubric of Digital Humanities. There is a need for new ways to access and to analyse information with tools reflecting the methodological requirements of a particular discipline and a need for new ways to publish that information. These are the three foundational components of DH addressed in this paper. I discuss ways in which language documentation can benefit from practices and tools developed in the humanities and ask what is offered to language documentors by large digital infrastructure projects.