Thick Interfaces: Mobilizing Language Documentation with Multimedia

This chapter assumes that you hope that some of your fieldwork results will one day be applied to the maintenance, strengthening, or revitalization of the visited community’s language. The documentation approach (Himmelmann 1998; Woodbury 2003) outlines fieldwork methodologies that increase the possibility that results can be used for these purposes. In addition, funding agencies such as HRELP insist that project results are “accessible to and usable by members of the language community as well as the wider linguistic community” (HRELP 2005). It is also wise to plan what kind of language support might be possible and to have an idea in advance of what works best. There are many ways that fieldwork results can be applied to improving local language situations – for example, by providing teaching notes, grammatical explanations, and dictionaries, and running workshops (cf. von Gleich 2005; and Chapter 3) – but this chapter focuses on creating multimedia products, because – they allow sound/video to be presented and controlled; – they integrate sound with other information; – in many cases, they can be directly derived from rich fieldwork datasets; – language teachers typically need accessible, interesting, and flexible language resources rather than analytical or even pedagogical resources, because teaching and learning situations vary.