A New Look at Archiving for Sensitive Community Based Materials: A "web 2.0" Approach to Distribution and Updates
David Nathan
School of Oriental and African Studies
The Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS is creating a new archiving system that takes advantage of developments in web-based social networking in order to address complexities of access and distribution of documentation materials. Many of these materials are sensitive because communities and their speakers are under pressures and deprivations, heightened by the dangers of recording naturalistic speech in small communities. To address this, the archive is reconceived as a forum for conducting relationships between information providers (depositors) and information users (language speakers, linguists and others), using the now-familiar idioms of the Facebook or eBay page. Rather than the archive having to continually broker complex access conditions, parties can negotiate directly with each other to achieve more flexible and creative outcomes. In this way we aim to increase the distribution and effectiveness of language documentation, and ultimately to make a stronger contribution to language research and to the maintenance of languages.
