Revitalization at a distance: Engaging digital archives for language reclamation∗ Claire Bowern, Sue Hanson, Denise Smith-Ali, and George Hayden February 10, 2021 1 Introduction Many languages of the world are endangered (Campbell & Belew, 2018) and many communities are interested in language work with linguists. What types of projects can be done with remote collaboration? How can remote collaborations benefit both communities and linguists? and, since remote collaborations cannot ever replace in person language reclamation and revitalization, how can remote collaborations proceed without taking time away from the vital work that is done in person? In this paper, we describe collaborative work in progress on reclamation projects between Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia and the Chirila (digital lexical materials for Australian languages; Bowern 2016) project. These projects were created in response to a need for language work which was respon- sive to community needs in different regions of Australia, but where the work could ∗This work was funded by NSF Grant BCS-1423711 “Typology as a Window on Prehistory”. Kado Muir, Luxie Hogarth-Redmond, and Geraldine Hogarth, provided language consultations and are coauthors of grammars through the bootcamp project for Ngalia and Kuwarra (respectively). Matt Tyler, Andy Zhang, Anaí Navarro, Ryan Budnick, Sasha Wilmoth, Akshay Aitha, Sarah Mihuc, Sarah Babinski, Kate Mooney, Omar Agha, Tom McCoy, Joshua Martin, and Lydia Ding were all members of the bootcamp projects over the years. Thanks to Juhyae Kim for comments on a draft of this paper and to the audience of the NASI conference in September 2020 for their questions and feedback. 1 also be done remotely: that is, aiding reclamation work without taking attention away from local collaborations within families or schools. Such work does not in any way re- place language work on the ground, and community-internal language work, but it can augment existing projects and continue connections while we cannot meet in person, as well as provide undergraduate linguistics students with in depth training in language documentation.1 The main language reclamation goal for the Chirila project has been to improve the accessibility of Aboriginal archival materials for Indigenous communities. We have proceeded in several ways. One is through informal data sharing and community-led collaborations. For example, we act as a clearinghouse for “gray literature” – language materials which may be hard for communities to access because they were only circu- lated in arenas where academic linguists have access (cf. Nordhoff & Hammarström, 2012a,b). We work in conjunction with Language Centres and groups such as Living Languages (formerly known as RNLD) to provide information stored in academic repos- itories about Australian Indigenous languages, so that members of Australia’s Stolen Generations (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997) can recover cultural and linguistic heritage. More formally, we have conducted grammar “bootcamps” to work with linguistic fieldnotes. The aim of the bootcamps is to make archival resources for grammatical data more easily usable by Aboriginal communities in their language programs. They are nicknamed “bootcamps” because we work intensively on the materials for a month as a summer research workshop. Such fieldnote materials are often copious but are often impenetrable. Such materials may also contain extensive examples of the language but not include information about linguistic generalizations, which makes it more difficult 1Note that also this paper describes work done in the years 2014–2018, this model is likely to be especially relevant now that fieldwork travel is halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It ismore important than ever to protect elders and that includes academic researchers not conducting activities which may (even inadvertently) bring or reintroduce Covid to Indigenous communities. 2 for them to be used in pedagogical programs, such as school lessons. In this paper, how the bootcamps work and the types of materials that are par- ticularly suited to this style of collaboration. We describe the types of materials that are produced and how these can feed into community language programs. We describe how the bootcamps use collaboration “at a distance” to train university students in ethics and community partnerships, and comment on how the projects have worked from both the community and university perspective. We stress that this is only one possible model of remote collaboration. It was designed for the needs of the Goldfields Language Centre and the Noongar Budjar Language Centre. It also fit well with Yale’s Linguistics Department and the goals of our linguistics program. It was appropriate, given the language materials available and the expertise of the project leaders (who are the authors of this paper). In this case, learner’s guides (or sketches) and dictionary editing were the current language priorities for the Language Centres, and that was work which the remote participants (at Yale) were qualified to work on. Other partnerships could well involve different projects or modes of collaboration. It is fundamental to the success of partnerships like these that they grow from actual community needs. 2 The bootcamp concept The concept of the grammar bootcamp is simple. Several undergraduate students work together (and with a supervisor, this case, Claire Bowern) to write a sketch grammar of a language from existing materials. They do this in collaboration with language community members and a local linguist (where possible), to make linguistic general- izations and write them up as far as possible. Sue Hanson and Denise Smith-Ali are Senior Linguists for the Goldfields Language Centre and the Noongar Boodjar Lan- guage Cultural Aboriginal Corporation espectively). It is called a ‘bootcamp’ because 3 this is done intensively: the aim is to write a book-length description in a single month. 2.1 How the project arose The bootcamps originated as a collaboration between Sue Hanson and Claire Bowern (two of the authors of this paper). Sue is a linguist, now based at the Goldfield Aboriginal Language Centre in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Claire is based at Yale University in the USA. Regional language centres in Australia are typically the main (and sole) coordination point for all linguistic work for the Indigenous languages of the region. This might involve everything from coordinating language help at the local schools, to language documentation, to coordinating with local and regional authorities for signage, to fielding interpreter requests, and helping external researchers. They are typically funded with bare-bones federal funding (which requires extensive record keeping and audits) and are usually staffed with some permanent staff and oneor more volunteers; they are usually overseen by a council or board of elders; indigenous representatives of the languages of the region. Sue had projects which needed linguistic expertise but because of the complexity of running a language centre that represents multiple languages, and the many demands on her time that coordinating that centre entails, there was more work to do than time to do it. Claire has undergraduate students in the US who are looking for research projects, but cannot necessarily travel to Australia (which would also place more of the supervision burden back on Sue). We wanted to find a way to work that would a) result in materials that were wanted and needed by the Indigenous communities we are working with; and b) provide a meaningful training experience for undergraduates, to encourage them to continue work with ethical language documentation.2 2One might reasonably point out that this project centers linguists rather than community mem- bers, and focuses on the linguists and linguistic work rather than the reclamation activities. This is true. We see it as important for academic linguists to be trained in the ethics of what they do, and that has to start as early as possible in a person’s linguistics career. This paper also describes a small piece in a much larger set of work by regional language centres in Australia, run by language 4 Previous stages of the Chirila project (Bowern, 2016) focused on lexicographic ma- terials, and in particular, the creation of a database of lexical items in Australian languages. Materials were identified and permission obtained to add them tothe database.3 In the course of this lexicographic work, it became clear that another type of collection is also found in archives: the materials of field workers who conducted extensive work on languages but were, for a variety of reasons, unable to write up and publish the results of that fieldwork. In the course of identifying archival collections for processing, Claire has also been approached by linguists offering to provide mate- rials for student projects. That is, there is a growing awareness within the field that unpublished fieldnote collections represent an opportunity for student researchers to gain valuable experience in language documentation. Once the general set of principles was worked out, Sue suggested projects to com- munities and we worked with those who were keen to participate. So, while the project was not directly “community-initiated”, it was initiated through local needs, and the partnerships were with communities who wished to work in this way.4 2.2 The languages involved Four bootcamps were conducted over