[Linganth] Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!

[Kerim Friedman]

I thought this project would interest list members, but as I have nothing
to do with organizing it, please respond to the appropriate address listed
below, not to me.

https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/
<https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/?fbclid=IwAR0P3AaxDg5DDh-RFimIF8GTJX1A9GVLkVti-_xUXZCMEKPOTDhePA4xICc#CIS-EN>

Cheers,

Kerim


Call for Contributions and Reflections: Your experiences in Decolonizing
the Internet’s Languages!
<https://whoseknowledge.org/initiatives/callforcontributions/?fbclid=IwAR0P3AaxDg5DDh-RFimIF8GTJX1A9GVLkVti-_xUXZCMEKPOTDhePA4xICc#CIS-EN>



*“It’s not just the words that will be lost. The language is the heart of
our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It’s too
beautiful for English to explain.” – Potawatomi elder, cited in Robin Wall
Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.”*



The problem: The internet we have today is not multilingual enough to
reflect the full depth and breadth of humanity. Language is a good proxy
for, or way to understand, knowledge – different languages can represent
different ways of knowing and learning about our worlds. Yet most online
knowledge today is created and accessible only through colonial languages,
and mostly English. The UNESCO Report on ‘A Decade of Promoting
Multilingualism in Cyberspace
<https://unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentViewer.xhtml?v=2.1.196&id=p::usmarcdef_0000232743&file=/in/rest/annotationSVC/DownloadWatermarkedAttachment/attach_import_8df09604-0040-4b44-b53c-110207ac407d%3F_%3D232743eng.pdf&locale=en&multi=true&ark=/ark:/48223/pf0000232743/PDF/232743eng.pdf#685_15_CI_EN_int.indd%3A.7579%3A23>’
(2015) estimated that “out of the world’s approximately 6,000 languages,
just 10 of them make up 84.3 percent of people using the Internet, with
English and Chinese the dominant languages, accounting for 52 per cent of
Internet users worldwide.” More languages become endangered and disappear
every year; 230 languages have become extinct between 1950 and 2010
<http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/endangered-languages/atlas-of-languages-in-danger/>
.

At best, then, 7% of the world’s languages
<https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics> are captured in published material,
and an even smaller fraction of these languages are available online. This
is particularly critical for communities who have been historically or
currently marginalized by power and privilege – women, people of colour,
LGBT*QIA folks, indigenous communities, and others marginalized from the
global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific
Islands). We often cannot add or access knowledge in our own languages on
the internet. This reinforces and deepens inequalities and invisibilities
that already exist offline, and denies all of us the richness of the
multiple knowledges of the world.

Some of the issues that shape our abilities to create and share content
online in our languages include:

   - the internet’s infrastructure (hardware, software, platforms,
   protocols…);
   - content management tools and technologies for translation,
   digitization, and archiving (voice, machine-learning systems and AI,
   semantic web…);
   - the experience of those who consume and produce information online in
   different languages (devices like cell phones and laptops, messaging tools,
   micro-blogging, audio-video…);
   - the experience of looking for content in different languages online,
   through search engines and other tools.

Understanding the range of these issues will help us map the possibilities
and concerns around linguistic biases and disparities on the internet.

Who we are: We are a group of three research partners who believe that the
internet we co-create should support, share, and amplify knowledge in all
of the world’s languages. For this to happen, we need to better understand
the challenges and opportunities that support or prevent our languages and
knowledges from being online. The Centre for Internet and Society
<https://cis-india.org/> (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes
interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy
and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility
for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property
rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open
standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video),
internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and
cyber-security. The Oxford Internet Institute <https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/> is
a multidisciplinary research and teaching department of the University of
Oxford, dedicated to the social science of the Internet. Whose Knowledge?
<https://whoseknowledge.org/> is a global campaign to centre the knowledges
of marginalized communities – the majority of the world – online.

Together we are creating a State of the Internet’s Languages report, as
baseline research with both numbers and stories, to demonstrate how far we
are from making the internet multilingual. We also hope to offer some
possibilities for doing more to create the multilingual internet we want.

Why we need YOU: This research needs the experiences and expertise of
people who think about these issues of language online from different
perspectives.

You may be a person who

   - Self-identifies as being from a marginalized community, and you find
   it difficult to bring your community’s knowledge online because the
   technology to display your language’s script is hard to access or read.
   - Works on creating content in languages that are from parts of the
   world, and from people, who are mostly invisible and unheard online.
   - Is a techie who works on making keyboards for non-colonial languages.
   - Is a linguist who tries to bring together communities and technologies
   in a way that is easy and accessible.
   - …. you may be any of these, all of these, or more!

We are looking for your experience online to help us tell the story of how
limited the language capacities of the internet are, currently, and how
much opportunity there is for making the internet share our knowledges in
our many different languages. Most importantly: you don’t have to be an
academic or researcher to apply, we particularly encourage people
experiencing these issues in their everyday lives and work to contribute!
Some of the key questions we’d like you to explore:

   - How are you or your community using your language online?
   - What do you wish you could create or share in your language online
   that you can’t today?
   - What does content in your language look like online? What exists,
   what’s missing? *(you might think about, for example, news, social
   media, education or government websites, e-commerce, entertainment, online
   libraries and archives, self-published content, etc)*
   - How and where and using what technologies do you share or create
   content in your language? *(you might think about, for example, video,
   audio, writing, social media, digitization…whatever formats, tools,
   processes or websites you use for creating oral, visual, textual, or other
   forms of content.)*
   - What is challenging to create or share on your language online? *(you
   might think about, for example, access, device usability, platforms,
   websites, apps and other tools, software, fonts, digital literacy, etc when
   developing digital archives, online language resources, or just making any
   presence on the web in general for your language.)*

Submissions:

We would love to hear about your and your community’s experiences in
response to any or some of the above questions!

Your contribution could be in the form of a written essay, a visualization
or work of art, a video or recorded conversation – we’d be happy to
interview you if that’s your preference. We would be happy to accept in any
language, and will review the submissions with the support of our
multilingual communities and friends.

Are you interested in participating? Please email raw at cis-india.org a short
note (of about 300 words) by 2 September at 23:59 IST (Indian Standard Time),
briefly outlining your idea along with the following information:

   - Your name
   - Your location – both country of origin and your current location is
   useful!
   - Your language(s)
   - Your community or any other background you’d care to share with us
   - Which questions you’re interested in addressing, and why
   - Your prefered contribution format
   - Any requests for how we can best support your participation

Timeline:

   - By 2nd September 2019: Send us your submission note
   - By 1st November 2019: Contributors will be notified of selection
   - By 1st December 2019: First round of contributions are due. We’ll work
   with you to finalise contributions by mid January.

Selected contributors will be offered an honorarium of USD 500, and their
final works will be published as part of the Decolonising the Internet –
Languages Report, in early 2020.

Note: this call for contributions is in a few languages right now, but we
invite our friends and communities to translate into many more! Please
reach out to *info (at) whoseknowledge (dot) org* with your translations…
thank you!


-- 


*P. Kerim Friedman 傅可恩 <http://kerim.oxus.net/>*

Associate Professor
The Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures
College of Indigenous Studies
National DongHwa University, TAIWAN
副教授國立東華大學族群關係與文化學系
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