About
2022 Santa María Lachixío - Professor Mark Sicoli, Felipa, and Daniel
This project with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) designs, develops and implements digital infrastructure for sharing back and sharing out the data of Zapotecan language documentations Sicoli has produced in research with speakers of 25 languages of the state of Oaxaca between 1997 and continuing in the present. This work builds on previous “proof of concept” pilot projects with student assistants, but which are not themselves durable or scaled to fulfill the goal of a robust shared digital infrastructure accessible to speaker communities.
Purpose
These sub-projects produce infrastructure for sharing back digital language archives with speaker communities and sharing them out to aid further research on these languages. We are working with two related database archives to produce living digital infrastructure for community access and archive enhancement and to make the data available for scholarly research.
Collaborative community dictionary
The first component of the work is to transform the Lachixío Zapotec lexical database into an online collaborative community dictionary. Sicoli developed the database with speakers from Santa María and San Vicente Lachixío under the auspices of the Project for the Documentation of the Languages of Mesoamerica begun in 1997 and developed to the present. This online resource is being built with the open-source software Mukurtu and will contain a searchable dictionary, collection of narratives and other texts, photos and video files.
Zapotec and Chatino Languages survey
The second component of the project is based on the data of a linguistic survey of Zapotecan languages across the Mexican state of Oaxaca that Sicoli co-directed with Kaufman between 2007-2010 with support of the Mexican National Institute of Indigenous Languages and which was archived with support of the NEH (2013-2016). This archive structure links the sound files and transcribed speaker responses to survey questions which elicited parallel words and phrases from speakers of 123 towns representing 25 distinct languages.
Work with IATH develops a new online tool for the structured display of the transcriptions, includes a flexible search function with domains specifiable for towns, regions, and linguistic branches of language family, and allows for playback of relevant segment of the archive audio recordings. Limited writing access will also be possible through a security protocol for entering alternative transcriptions such as in a practical orthography for community pedagogy, or for the phonetic and phonological transcription of linguistic researchers.
