CoRSAL is a joint project of Indiana University Bloomington Linguistics and the University of North Texas Digital Libraries (PIs Shobhana Chelliah [IUB], Mark Phillips [UNT]). CoRSAL works with language communities to document, preserve, and share materials in and about South Asian languages. We offer free virtual and in-person workshops on language documentation and archiving for students, researchers, and collectors from all walks of life to gain the skills necessary to advance language documentation initiatives, both in pursuit of scientific understanding of language (its history, and structure) and in celebration of South Asia's rich cultural and linguistic heritage.
 
Organizational structure:
  • Founding Director, Shobhana Chelliah, oversees CoRSAL's day-to-day operations from IUB alongside a team of students and postdocs
  • Advisory Board members (Drs. Oksana Zavalina, Mark Phillips, Sadaf Munshi, Mary Burke, and Ana Roeschley) conduct research on digital language archiving featuring CoRSAL collections
  • CoRSAL belongs to the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network as an associate member

CoRSAL activities:

  • Annual symposia (2017-present)
  • An occasional publications series
  • Field experiences in South Asia for US students
  • Training workshops in language documentation and archiving for Indigenous and community language documenters
  • Curriculum development at the intersection of language documentation, library and information sciences, and archival studies: the collection, appraisal, and preservation of language and culture materials, made accessible by high-quality descriptive metadata

CoRSAL is supported by:

  • Awards to individual linguists and institutions: per the discipline standard, proposals to the US National Science Foundation and other federal and foundation sources may include budgeting for archiving. When funding is available, depositors pay CoRSAL a fee for archiving. The fee for archiving is waived for those unable to provide funding (true for most depositors from Indigenous communities, independent scholars, or South Asian institutions).
  • The CoRSAL Excellence Endowment at UNT
  • Departmental funding from UNT Linguistics and UNT Libraries
  • College of Arts and Sciences and Dhar India Studies funding through IUB
  • The Firebird Foundation
  • Research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences
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