The numerous crises of the last years have palpably demonstrated that access to field sites can quickly be severly restricted for linguists engaged in language description around the world. Furthermore, issues of ecological responsibility and sustainability urge 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 utilising legacy materials to supplement own field data. Such legacy materials, which can result from colonial, missionary, scientific enterprises, or other activities, can present a number of challenges. Modern-trained linguists may question the reliability and methodological biases of these materials, and may be faced with unfamiliar terminology, ontological systems, frameworks, presentation style, typographies, and other features. Nevertheless, these materials can frequently provide valuable insights for contemporary language analyses and descriptions. They may contain data that can offer insights for diachronic work, otherwise inaccessible lexical data, textual materials in registers or genres absent from the contemporary corpus, and morphological data necessary to complete paradigms.
The objective of this workshop is to facilitate a dialogue between descriptive linguists who engage with legacy materials pertaining to their area of expertise on the one hand and scientists specialised in handling legacy materials, i.e. archivists, librarians as well as researchers on the history of linguistics. One of its primary aims is to rehabilitate the use of legacy materials in descriptive projects and to encourage descriptive linguists to include these materials that usually tend to be ignored. 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. It provides a platform to exchange about specific problems and potential solutions.
Some general issues that will be explored during the workshop are:
- What are the reasons that legacy materials are dismissed?
- What are the aspects that averted linguists to deal with these materials 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 from the use of such older materials, both in terms of primary data and in terms of a meta-grammaticographical analysis of older practices?
- What does using older descriptive materials reveal about our current perspectives on grammar writing and data collection?
- Do textual, grammatical and lexicographical legacy materials require different approaches?
Additionally, the following focus questions shall be specifically addressed by the workshop:
- 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?
