35.3061, Calls: Discussions on Legacy Materials (DiLegMa) – Opportunities and challenges for descriptive linguistics

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-3061. Mon Nov 04 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.3061, Calls: Discussions on Legacy Materials (DiLegMa) – Opportunities and challenges for descriptive linguistics

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Date: 01-Nov-2024
From: Selin Grollmann [selin.grollmann at unibe.ch]
Subject: Discussions on Legacy Materials (DiLegMa) – Opportunities and challenges for descriptive linguistics


Full Title: Discussions on Legacy Materials (DiLegMa) – Opportunities
and challenges for descriptive linguistics

Date: 24-Apr-2025 - 25-Apr-2025
Location: Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Bern,
Switzerland
Contact Person: Pascal Gerber
Meeting Email: pascal.gerber at unibe.ch
Web Site:
https://www.isw.unibe.ch/forschung/workshops/discussions_on_legacy_materials/index_ger.html

Linguistic Field(s): Discipline of Linguistics; General Linguistics;
History of Linguistics; Language Documentation

Call Deadline: 15-Dec-2024

Meeting Description:

The numerous political and ecological crises of the last years have
palpably demonstrated that access to field sites can quickly be
severely restricted for linguists engaged in language description
around the world. Furthermore, issues of environmental responsibility
and sustainability are motivating linguists working on languages that
require long-distance flights to reconsider their workflows and data
sources. Those factors have resulted in a renewed interest in
utilizing legacy materials to supplement one's own field data.

Legacy materials, which may result from colonial, missionary, earlier
scientific enterprises or other activities, can present a number of
challenges. From a contemporary perspective, they may seem deficient
both with regards to content and methodology. Modern trained linguists
may be faced with unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems,
frameworks, presentation style or typographies.

At the same time, legacy materials may provide numerous valuable
insights for contemporary descriptive projects, so that consideration
of their inclusion in such projects can be advisable. They may contain
otherwise inaccessible or unattested lexical and grammatical
information or textual materials in registers or genres absent from
the contemporary corpus. Additionally, legacy materials are often the
only source on an extinct or dormant language and therefore play a
major role in revitalization efforts.

For these reasons, legacy materials should, where they exist, be part
of the methodological toolbox of descriptive linguists. However,
depending on the region and language family, there are considerable
differences in how thoroughly and comprehensively legacy materials are
accessible, developed and utilized. Furthermore, the evaluation and
use of legacy materials is a time-intensive task and requires the
support of experts, e.g. library and archive scientists, specialized
philologists and historians of linguistics.

The objective of this workshop is to facilitate a dialogue between
descriptive linguists who engage with legacy materials of different
language (families) and with different levels of experience. This
exchange shall help to establish legacy materials as a relevant data
source for descriptive projects and to improve sharing of best
practices among researchers. The workshop also responds to the
increasing emphasis on sustainability by encouraging the reuse of
existing resources and by addressing the methodological challenges
that descriptive linguists may face when working with legacy data.

Call for Papers:

We invite presentations on specific findings or challenges related to
the use of legacy materials. Questions that may be addressed in the
presentations include:
- What are the reasons that legacy materials are dismissed and why are
these hard to deal with from our current perspectives on data and data
collection?
- What are possible ways to make these materials usable and how can
they be fruitfully integrated into a description project? What sort of
elements can be extracted, both in terms of primary data and in terms
of a meta-grammaticographical analysis of older practices? Do textual,
grammatical and lexicographical legacy materials require different
approaches?
- How do we deal with questionnaires, which were not necessarily
collected long ago, but in a specific framework or with a specific
goal?
- How do we deal with unprocessed / raw field notes of other
linguists?
- How do we deal with lay publications such as school materials or
language course books?
- How can we extract metadata where no explicit metadata information
is given? Equally, how can data be “stripped off” of a certain
framework How can this framework be identified?

Abstracts (anonymized, maximally one page with font size 12, including
examples, but excluding references) should be sent to
dilegma2025 at gmail.com and will be evaluated by the scientific
committee. Notifications will be sent out by 24 January 2025.

The full call with more information can be found at:
https://www.isw.unibe.ch/unibe/portal/fak_historisch/dsl/isw/content/e41093/e1002331/e1577184/e1587298/files1587300/CfP-DiLegMa-Bern_ger.pdf



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