legacy materials

[Joshua Beck]

Under the direction of Norman McQuown at the University of Chicago, many 
prominent linguists working on Mesoamerican indigenous languages 
(Berlin, Blair, Fox, Hopkins, Kaufman, Mayers, Sarles, Swadesh, and 
Whorf, as well as scores of other scholars—nearly 200 in all) 
contributed a wealth of field-work based resources (vocabulary lists, 
dictionaries, grammars, corpora of texts and elicited sentences, 
concordances, and guides to holdings of other research collections - 
roughly 175,000 pages of material in all) to the "Microfilm Collection 
of Manuscripts on Cultural Anthropology". Most of the Collection is 
related to field work on the indigenous languages of Mesoamerica 
conducted between 1930-1990 - although the out-dated system of 
classifying languages used in much of this material makes it difficult 
to assess precisely how many languages are documented in the collection, 
a conservative estimate would be around 100. You can find details and a 
Guide to the collection online at http://moca.lib.uchicago.edu/. An NEH 
Preservation and Access grant to our Language Archives in 2005 has 
supported digitization of roughly 500 hours of audio recordings, also 
made during the same time period - much of the audio material directly 
relates to the textual holdings of the Microfilm Collection. We're 
currently seeking support from the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered 
Languages program to digitize the Microfilm Collection, link it to the 
digitized audio, and present it online.




s.t. bischoff wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was wondering if anyone might know of some good resources for finding out
> about various legacy materials in museums, archives, garages, etc. I'm
> wondering if anyone has sat down and done a survey of all the linguistic work
> that has been done on indigenous languages. For example, I've heard that Boas
> left hundreds if not thousands of pages of material on indigenous languages.
> Also, Harrington has quite a reputation for having left field notes in various
> places. Has anyone done a systematic "inventory" of these types of materials,
> or has anyone proposed some way to do such an inventory? Is anyone aware of any
> archives that have field notes or recordings that are not be utilized?
>
> Thanks,
> Shannon
> PS Ives Goddard has a nice survey of linguistic work done in the Americas with
> excellent references in the Handbook of American Indians 17, for those
> interested in these things.
>
> __________________________
>
>
> "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins
> to wish facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
>
> --Sherlock Holmes, A Scandal in Bohemia
>   

-- 
Josh Beck
Associate Director for Programs & Development
Center for Latin American Studies
University of Chicago
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637

tel. (773) 702-8420
fax (773) 702-1755
http://clas.uchicago.edu