Accessing Archival Materials for Community Based Documentation & Revitalization
Colleen Fitzgerald
Ryan Nicholson
Daisy Rosenblum
Mikael Willie
Course Information
This workshop will provide an orientation to the vastly useful resources for language revitalization available in archival collections, from family photo albums to national museums. Workshop participants will come away from the course knowing where to look for previous documentation of their language and culture, what to look for, how to access and interpret such materials, how to digitize and store data once it has been recovered, and how these materials can serve as tremendous assets to the documentation and revitalization of language and culture. Hands-on exercises will supplement presentations; participants are encouraged to bring in materials, data and questions relevant to current projects.
Instructor(s) Bio:
Daisy Rosenblum is a doctoral student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her work focuses on collaborative, community-based documentation and description of interactive speech in the Mayan and Wakashan families for the purpose of maintenance and revitalization. Her research interests include prosody, argument structure, deixis, grammars of space and time, and the multi-modal interactions among them. She is currently working with members of the Kwakwaka'wakw Nation in British Columbia to record, transcribe and analyze multiple genres of spontaneous speech in three dialects of Kwak'wala. Their project gaχdzolaṁoχ ʔəʔedəʔaqaʔ "It finally came back" situates language documentation as an opportunity for revitalization-in-practice as team members use diverse research methods, including mapping, oral history interviews and archival research, to reanimate traditional knowledge and create educational materials for Kwak'wala learners.