Integrating archiving into the Language Documentation curriculum at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Abstract

The language documentation and conservation (LD&C) track in the Master of Arts program in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UHM) is unique in the United States and one of only a small handful of graduate programs in the world offering advanced degrees in the documentation of endangered languages. A key component of the program is the integration of the Kaipuleohone University of Hawai‘i Digital Ethnographic Archive into the curriculum.1 This paper discusses the development of Kaipuleohone and its increasing role in the professional development of students in the LD&C program at UHM. Kaipuleohone was started in 2008 by Nick Thieberger (Albarillo & Thieberger 2009). The original mission of the archive was to provide a permanent secure home for digitized language recordings from scholars affiliated with UHM over the five decades since the Department of Linguistics was created. During the first phase of Kaipuleohone, hundreds of recordings from eminent field linguists like Derek Bickerton and Robert Blust, as well as the collection of the Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies, were digitized and ingested. Now in its second phase, Kaipuleohone has increasingly become an archive for materials actively being collected, especially by students in the LD&C program. The core curriculum stresses the importance of archiving in the language documentation workflow, and Kaipuleohone provides an opportunity for students to develop good habits of consistent metadata collection and regular deposit, even from the field. Students are required to consider issues surrounding data longevity, access, and multipurpose value early in their careers, better preparing them for achieving the best practices of contemporary language documentation as professionals. In addition, good archiving practices among our students allows us to require the proper citation of documentary source materials in doctoral theses via permanent handles, furthering the scientific goal that linguistic claims be verifiable by data, and thus increasing the quality of scholarship in the Department. Kaipuleohone conforms to international archiving standards for digital archives. Audio files are stored at high resolution and the metadata conforms to the Open Language Archives Community, Open Archives Initiative and Dublin Core. All digital files are curated by the Library system at the University of Hawa‘i’s D-Space repository, ScholarSpace. Reference Albarillo, Emily A. & Nick Thieberger. 2009. Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai‘i’s Digital Ethnographic Archive. Language Documentation & Conservation 3(1): 1-14. 1 Kaipuleohone is Hawaiian for ‘gourd of sweet words’. We are grateful to Laiana Wong for suggesting this name and for allowing us to use it as the name of this archive