[Lingtyp] Concerns about U.S. policies and linguistic archives

Tue Feb 4 16:13:11 UTC 2025

In my message, I do not advertise LLMs as true archives. I only point out that much data are stored somewhere already; of course, we do not know in what format and order. Then, I do not think that when your government decides which data should be preserved (or backed up), they will ask linguists, which thus again leads us to LLMs / computer scientists.
Stela

________________________________
From: Lingtyp on behalf of William Croft via Lingtyp
Sent: Tuesday, February 4, 2025 5:01 PM
To: Juergen Bohnemeyer
Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Concerns about U.S. policies and linguistic archives

I would add that if Musk/Trump are successful in their efforts (they aren’t stopped by the courts or the people), then red states such as Texas may follow their lead. Also, federal funding pervades government budgets at all levels (state, local etc.), as everyone here is about to discover. That gives the federal government leverage over state and local goverment activities and budget allocations.

Bill

On Feb 4, 2025, at 7:33 AM, Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

Dear Jocelyn – Indeed, we are once again finding ourselves in “interesting”, read unprecedented and disturbing, times. Now, I may not be in the best position to respond to your query, but any immediate concern for the safety of language archives would only relate to things that are under the control of the federal government, such as the Library of Congress or the National Endowment for the Humanities. And as far as I know, these have not been archiving data and records from endangered languages.

I do, however, worry about the Smithsonian Institution in this regard. Other than the Smithsonian, the language archive that comes immediately to mind, AILLA at UT, is not under the purview of the federal government.

In any event, beyond the current situation, it seems indeed vitally important to connect the world’s digital language archives and create a system of mirrors in order to effectively decentralize the data and thereby make it less vulnerable to threats on any one site or even country. It’s my understanding that the people in charge of the archives are well aware of this and have begun to take steps. But it’s a long-haul project, based on my very incomplete understanding.

Best – Juergen

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

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From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Jocelyn Aznar via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Date: Tuesday, February 4, 2025 at 05:02
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
Subject: [Lingtyp] Concerns about U.S. policies and linguistic archives

Dear colleagues,

I know this list is primarily meant for discussing ideas and
observations related to linguistic typology, rather than politics.
However, current U.S. policies regarding scientific data have led me to
wonder whether these policies might affect the fields of linguistics and
humanities.

When I heard about data related to ecology and the environment being
discarded, I immediately worried the same could happen to linguistic
archives and datasets. But maybe it is just me, dear colleagues working
in the US, what do you think? Could this happen as well to archives
related to linguistics and humanities?

I believe that if we address this issue proactively, we’ll be better
placed to preserve more data should the need arise. For instance, we
could check whether the existing infrastructure outside of the US, ELAR,
HumaNum/Ortolang, Pangloss, Paradisec, etc, would be able to handle or
help to face such a crisis? or whether we should consider setting up
some sort of emergency server so that researchers can transfer data at
risk of being lost?

One possible strategy would be to prepare a brief manual (probably as a
webpage), after discussing with each institution of course, describing
which archives outside the U.S. could accept data from an archive from
the US, in which format, what kind of data would be accepted, etc. Then,
if needed, U.S based researchers could formulate a plan to safeguard
their data. By doing that, we could also identify gaps in current
coverage and, if necessary, establish an emergency archive or server to
fill those gaps.

Best regards,
Jocelyn Aznar

¹ I’m of course also concerned about data from other fields, though I
feel more competent discussing linguistic data. Still, if we build an
infrastructure for linguistic data from the U.S., it might be possible
to scale it up for other disciplines as well.
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