lsa 2009 tutorial

[Heidi A. Johnson]

Dear OUTREACHers,
(I just posted this message to the DELAMAN list; sorry if you're seeing it
twice.)

Jeff Good and I are working on the proposal for next year's LSA tutorial,
which 
will be about working with speakers to determine access conditions. (We
still 
need a catchy title: any ideas?) The general goal is to give our audience
some 
advice & ideas about talking to informants about the intended uses of
language 
documentation materials, by the original team and by future archive users,
so 
that they can make informed decisions about access terms and conditions. At 
first glance, the whole area of rights and access seems like a quagmire, but
we 
archivists have been at this long enough to recognize that reasonable people
can 
in fact make reasonable decisions about these things and express those
decisions 
in fairly simple archive access level terms. This tutorial will give us a
chance to share 
that knowledge and hopefully get some better metadata out of our linguists.
And 
also stop people from letting fear of copyrights prevent them from archiving
at all!

We have 3 speakers lined up so far - 4 if you count me, but I'll bow out if
we find 
someone better. The three are Gary Holton, Mary S. Linn, and Paul Newman,
who 
is a lawyer and a linguist who has written some articles on this theme (see 
http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/June2007/newman/newman.html.) I'm also going to
ask 
Rosemary Beam de Azcona, who wrote that great little essay that's now
available at 
the School, Ethics section.
http://emeld.org/school/classroom/ethics/consent.html.

We still need one or two more presenters. Ideally, we'd like to have a
speaker of
an endangered language who could talk about how he or she would like to find
materials in an archive on his or her language. Accessible? Restricted? What

sorts of things should be restricted and why? How and when should we talk to
our consultants about all this? Super-ideally, we'd get a testimonial
saying, "If it 
weren't for archives, I would have so much less knowledge of my heritage
language
and culture, it would be a great personal tragedy for me and all my kin."
:-)

Also, a major, if usually unspoken, fear that prevents people from archiving
is plagiarism.
Linguists are afraid that other linguists will use their data in ways they
don't like.
So we could use a talk that addresses that issue, too. Since this is an OLAC
tutorial,
it doesn't have to be just about endangered language resources. It would be
great
to have someone from e.g. sociolinguistics or psycholinguists on the panel,
or indeed,
anyone who has had other linguists make use (good or bad) of their archived
materials.

Unfortunately, we don't have travel money, so we need someone who can go on
their 
own ticket; usually we get people who would be going to LSA anyway. And more

unfortunately, none of the indigenous grad students at UT are going to that
meeting. 

Do any of you know of anyone who is willing and able to give a talk at our 
tutorial? Would any of you like to give a talk? Could somebody please think
of a
catchy title for this tutorial?

We need to get this proposal put together by mid-March.

Thanks!

Heidi

--------------------------------------
Heidi A. Johnson
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Dept. of Anthropology
1 University Station C3200
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
http://www.ailla.utexas.org



--------------------------------------
Heidi A. Johnson
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Dept. of Anthropology
1 University Station C3200
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712
http://www.ailla.utexas.org