January 2023: SSILA Presentations

As part of a team with Claire Bowern (Yale) and students Sunny Ananthanarayan (Yale) and Sophie Pierson (UT Austin), I’m authoring two talks at the 2023 online meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas this Jan. 20-22.

On Jan. 20, Sophie will present our first talk, “Where FLEx falls flat: A reflection on built-in assumptions of documentation software and their consequences for language work“. Abstract:

Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) is a database software technology widely used for analysis of Indigenous language materials. While FLEx has many advantages, it also makes many implicit assumptions about the user, as well as about the structure and content of language records. Taking two projects analyzing Ticuna (isolate) and Ayöök (Mixe-Zoque) as case studies, we demonstrate that these assumptions harm the field of linguistics by excluding key groups of users and by erecting barriers to theoretically and practically relevant research. By drawing attention to these issues, we begin the process of replacing FLEx with software that better meets community needs.

On Jan. 21, Sunny will present our second talk, “flibl: A tool to bolster text transfer between ELAN and FLEx“. Abstract:

In language acquisition research on indigenous languages in the Americas, we often require the use of documentation software, including FLEx and ELAN. However, such apps often lack necessary features for acquisition work. Considering the needs of projects on Ayöök and Ticuna, we respond to this inadequacy by presenting a tool, flibl, that resolves issues with preserving information like speaker/addressee and, more uniquely, allows users to gloss phonetic and target versions of utterances distinctly while maintaining tier association for re-export into ELAN. flibl acts as an example of a tool that facilitates certain processes otherwise inhibited by existing workflows.