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Thursday, 4 JanuaryTutorialA Field Linguist's Guide to Making Long-Lasting Texts and DatabasesCapistrano Room4:00 - 7:00 PMOrganizers:Sponsor:Participants:Jeff Good (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)Heidi Johnson (University of Texas, Austin)Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Working Group on OutreachLaura Buszard-Welcher (The Rosetta Project)Deborah Anderson (University of California, Berkeley)Michael Appleby (The LinguistList)Jessica Boynton (Eastern Michigan University)Naomi Fox (University of Utah)Connie Dickinson (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen/University of San Francisco, Quito)Over the last several decades, there has been a dramatic increase in the technologies available for language documentation. This islargely a positive development--our records of an endangered language are no longer limited to ink on paper but can now includeaudio and video recordings of rich interactions among speakers. Field linguists know how to organize and analyze the data theycollect, facilitating multiple uses for datasets and improving consistency in data entry. A plethora of software programs is availablefor creating texts and databases, from ASCII text editors to web-accessible SQL databases. And therein lies a problem: How canlinguists choose the tools that will serve their needs best in the present, while producing materials that will survive long into thefuture?The first problem is finding a font that represents the characters needed for transcribing and analyzing the language being documented.In the past, linguists have had to rely on fonts such as SIL Doulos, which had a life span of only a few years and were nearlyimpossible to port from one computer platform to another. The solution to the font problem is Unicode, which defines a standard setof characters that includes all the characters for the world's most common writing systems, as well as the International PhoneticAlphabet.The next problem is choosing a format for digital files that can be used for the duration of a language documentation project andbeyond. Most of the readily available software, such as Microsoft Word and FilemakerPro, produces files in proprietary formats thatcan only be read by the original program. Even files made a mere decade ago may not be readable using the latest version of the sameprogram. Linguists need to be able to produce files that they can continue to use year after year, without having to continually converteach document to a new version of their software. The solution is simple: Work should be saved frequently in nonproprietary, openformats.Commercial software is also often not well-suited for language documentation tasks. Recordings need to be transcribed andannotated; most linguists want to interlinearize at least some of their texts; datasets, such as lexicons, need to be constructed in formatsthat support analysis, cross-referencing, and multiple styles of output. There is software specifically created for languagedocumentation tasks, but the learning curve for much of it is steep, and the documentation is often inadequate for the beginning user.The purpose of this tutorial is to recommend tools and strategies for creating long-lived and useful texts and databases for languagedocumentation. The speakers present a set of commonly-used software tools with tips for getting started and ideas for fully exploitingthe tools' capabilities. The ultimate goal of this tutorial is to aid field linguists in gaining mastery of a small suite of tools that willexpedite their data collection, entry, and management tasks so that they can focus their time and attention on the real work oftranslation and analysis.73