legacy materials

[David Lewis]

This is, on my experience, not the way things work. I have worked with
and organized the Southwest Oregon Research Project Collection at the
University of Oregon. Over the course of three field research gathering
trips, we have gathered close to 200,000 pages of information. Most of
this information has been freely given to 17 tribes in and around
Oregon. The collection now creates the backbone for research on native
languages throughout Oregon and now that the linguistic departments are
beginning to produce native linguists, they can go back to this
collection and access their language from over 100 years before. This is
occurring in various ways. The main problem is lack of archive-ally
train staff at tribes. The tribes are just in the past 10-5 year begun
forming their tribal archives. 

The main issues are economics. In a perfect world we could seamlessly
collect data from archives and immediately analyze it. But most of us do
not live in that world. It takes lots of money, time, and planning to
collection archival materials, then lots more money, time, and planning
to analyze it and use it in tribal communities. I can not see how you
can place absolutes on how data is collected. Yes collection from living
speaking may be more important, but so is beginning the archival
collection because it will take about 5-10 years for that archive to be
functional in the perfect world. And today, with data collection going
digital, there are other problems of longevity of records, more time for
scanning, etc.  which should not take precedence over the actual
physical collection of and organization of paper collection which still
have a longer shelf life than digital collections. 


David G. Lewis
Manager, Cultural Resources Department
Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde
Office 503.879.1634
David.Lewis at grandronde.org

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology
[mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] On Behalf Of William J Poser
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 6:28 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] legacy materials

Dan Harvey wrote:
>I disagree that analysis be done later...

I agree that analysis cannot be separated from data collection.
When I said that analysis of legacy materials can be done later,
I was referring only to circumstances in which live data is
available, the point being not only that we will end up with
more data in toto but that an interaction between data gathering
and analysis is only possible when working with living speakers.
When I said that the analysis can be done later, I meant only
that since the legacy data is already "dead", someone in the future
can do as good a job of studying it as I can, whereas I can do
better working with living speakers than someone in the future will
be able to for the simple reason that there probably won't be any
in the future.

The idea that one can simply gather an unanalyzed corpus
and store it away, which some people are promoting, is
I think quite fallacious.  It encourages people to bypass
the interactive data gathering and analysis that is likely
to produce the greatest insight, and all too often it seems to
be associated with projects that expend an awful lot of time and
money to obtain a very small amount of data.

Bill