[Lingtyp] Outsourcing fieldwork to indigenous communities

[Ana Krajinovic]

Hi Cat,

in the paper cited below we argue that community members can more easily 
record high-quality data because of their knowledge of the culture and 
because they have better access to the speakers and quiet places. 
However, I wouldn’t call this outsourcing, as our objective was mutual 
benefits for linguists and for the community in Erakor, Vanuatu that 
wanted to record more traditional stories and cultural practices.

The main thing is that you need to train the speakers on the 
documentation workflow, but this is not a problem if they are familiar 
with using a laptop. We also provided all the equipment, but a potential 
obstacle is that the equipment gets old and breaks down, and so it takes 
a continuous effort to keep the collaboration going. In our case, the 
speakers made a very nice collection of 10 hours, which is now archived 
in PARADISEC.

Krajinović, A., Billington, R., Emil, L., Kaltap̃au, G., Thieberger, N. 
(2022). Community-Led Documentation of Nafsan (Erakor, Vanuatu). In: 
Vetulani, Z., Paroubek, P., Kubis, M. (eds) Human Language Technology. 
Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics. LTC 2019. Lecture Notes 
in Computer Science(), vol 13212. Springer, Cham. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05328-3_8.
Preprint: 
https://anakrajinovic.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Community-led_documentation.pdf

Hope this helps!

All the best,

Ana

On 2026-01-13 17:49, Françoise Rose via Lingtyp wrote:
> Hi Cat,
> 
> I would like to suggest the following reading.
> 
> Mihas, EIena. 2012. Subcontracting native speakers in linguistic 
> fieldwork: a case study of the Ashéninka Perené (Arawak) research 
> community from the Peruvian Amazon. Language Documentation and 
> Conservation 6. 1–21.
> 
> Best to you all,
> Françoise
> 
> 
> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> De la part de 
> Cat Butz via Lingtyp
> Envoyé : mardi 13 janvier 2026 17:12
> À : Lingtyp <Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Objet : [Lingtyp] Outsourcing fieldwork to indigenous communities
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I hope you're all doing well. Could you please direct me to resources 
> talking about benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing linguistic 
> fieldwork to indigenous communities (i.e., paying members of indigenous 
> communities to do fieldwork in their own or adjacent communities)? If 
> anyone wants to directly tell me about their experience doing this, 
> that also counts as a resource. Thank you.
> 
> Warmest,
> --
> Cat Butz (she)
> HHU Düsseldorf
> General Linguistics
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