In his conference, David Nathan presents the general concept of archiving, with a focus on the Endangered Language ARchives (ELAR) of SOAS. He displays the main principles and concepts of archiving, and discusses issues in data management, giving advice on how to produce good and useful archives (strategies, file organization, file naming, formats and encoding, video and audio files, metadata, etc.). As director of ELAR, D. Nathan presents the particularities of this archive, its philosophy and functions. He further offers reflections on innovative web technologies and their utility, for linguistics in general and for endangered language support in particular.
The conference and the PowerPoint material are in English.
David Nathan is the Director of the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at the School of African and Oriental Languages (SOAS) in London. He has worked for nearly twenty years with computing applications for endangered languages, especially Australian Aboriginal languages. He has also developed software for language research, publication, and education. Currently he is absorbed in the development of the Endangered Languages Archive, its close connections to issues in language documentation, language support and education, and linguistic research, and how these connections can be supported through innovative web technologies.
