Linguistic archives and language communities questionnaire: establishing (re-)use criteria
ISSN: 0264-0473
Article publication date: 3 June 2022
Issue publication date: 29 November 2022
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to prepare data that can be used as a base for establishing best practices for making archival linguistic materials available for (re-)use by members of language communities.
Design/methodology/approach
To assess how archival materials can be made more readily available to marginalized language communities, the authors use a questionnaire targeted at their members and, to a lesser extent, outsider researchers worldwide.
Findings
The collected data shows certain peculiar – and likely new – tendencies that are vital for finding practical approaches to data access. Importantly, the language communities in question have decent internet access, mainly via mobiles phones and smartphones. They are actively present in social networks and commonly use messengers.
Research limitations/implications
This study has several biases. It pre-depends on internet access and is based upon a relatively small group of respondents fluent in English, Russian, Spanish or French. Besides these, not all questions were apparently understood as intended.
Practical implications
To enable better access of marginalized language communities to archived language materials, it seems meaningful to recommend developing mobile-friendly infrastructure, possibly integrated into popular platforms.
Originality/value
To the best the authors’ knowledge, the question of access to archived linguistic materials by language community members globally, as well as their connectivity and communication habits, was not the subject of previous research with the means of survey data.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The QUEST project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). We are very thankful to the respondents for dedicating their time and information to assist us. We are grateful to our colleagues, Dr. Jocelyn Aznar, Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka, and Dr. Frank Seifart for fruitful discussions and valuable suggestions. Dr. Aznar is also to be especially thanked for assistance with translation. The authors would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable commentaries and suggestions.
Data statement: Repository: Marginalized language communities questionnaire: Summary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5849282.
This project contains the following underlying data: • Lang_Communities_Questionnaire_Summary_27.12.21.xlsx (anonymized results of the questionnaire by 27.12.2021 and their summary).
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.
Citation
Khait, I., Lukschy, L. and Seyfeddinipur, M. (2022), "Linguistic archives and language communities questionnaire: establishing (re-)use criteria", The Electronic Library, Vol. 40 No. 5, pp. 539-551. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-01-2022-0012
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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