The ‘Language Archiving Technology’ solutions for sustainable data from digital fieldwork research

Since the late 1990s, the Technical Group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics (TG, now The Language Archive, TLA) has worked on solutions for ‘sustainable data from digital research’, in particular, how to guarantee long-term availability of digital data for future research. These activities have gained a new dimension and new dynamics since 2000, when the TG started to participate in the program Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen ‘Documentation of Endangered Languages’ (DOBES). DOBES was crucial in establishing the new field of language documentation which aims at creating lasting multi-purpose corpora of annotated multi-media samples of small and understudied languages. The TG’s contribution included hosting the emerging DOBES archive. This was a major factor for the ongoing development of ‘Language Archiving Technology’ (LAT), which will be explained and detailed below. This chapter presents the LAT solutions to many of the challenges for sustainable data from digital fieldwork research (and much of it carries over to other types of digital research data).First we outline our conception of digital fieldwork data and sustainability (§1), then we present the LAT suite of programs and web services (§2), discuss open access and legal and ethical issues (§3) and finally (§4) we summarize LAT answers to several relevant questions. A short conclusion (§5) summarises the most important points.

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