Methods of Language Documentation in the DOBES project
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2002)
Abstract
The DOBES program for the documentation of endangered languages, started in September 2000, has just completed its pilot phase. Eight documentation teams and one archiving team worked out agreements on formats, tools, naming conventions, and encoding, especially the linguistic level of encoding. These standards will form the basis for a five-year main phase, which will include about 20 teams. In the pilot phase, strategies to set up an online archive incorporating redundancy and regular backup were developed and implemented. Ethical and legal aspects of the archiving process were discussed and amounted to a number of documents to which all participants have to adhere to. Tools and converters developed within the pilot phase are available to others.