Living Language Infrastructure: Community-engaged Digital Humanities

We welcome you to the next installment of our digital humanities speaker series, brought to you by IATH and Scholars' Lab, both of the Library's DH Center. These are Center fellows' work-in-progress presentations with a friendly student, faculty, and staff audience, in the main space of the Scholars’ Lab, 308 Shannon Library. All are welcome, and refreshments will be served.

Join us for a presentation by Mark Sicoli (Anthropology), along with student assistant Emma Broadwater, and Shayne Brandon and Doug Ross of IATH, on his in-progress IATH Fellowship project, “Data Back!: Building a digital infrastructure for sharing back the data of Zapotecan language documentation for community uses and scholarly collaborations.”

Data Back! is building a living digital infrastructure centered on the Zapotecan language family, spoken in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The project will draw on and transform data from a linguistic survey of Zapotec and Chatino languages and a lexical database of Lachixío Zapotec, generating tools and practices that share the data with speaker communities, assist communities in the teaching and learning of Zapotecan languages, and support further research on these languages.