University of North Texas 
Discovery Series Presents:
Metadata & Interoperable Digital Language Databases
by Helen Aristar-Dry and Gary Simons
The Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data (EMELD) has been a valued resource for linguists and archivists since its creation from
2001-2007. Funded by several generous grants from the National Science Foundation,
EMELD was conceived with two goals in mind: 1) to aid in the preservation of endangered
language data and documentation and 2) to aid in the development of the standards
necessary for effective collaboration among electronic archives.
The project ran seven workshops that brought together data scientists and documentary
linguists to develop standards and recommend practices in metadata creation, lexicon
construction, text annotation, database design, and tool development; the workshops
resulted in numerous seminal presentations and working group reports. Associated projects
also provided digital maps for locating languages (LL-MAP) and a digital library of language relationships (Multi-Tree).
The online interface for EMELD includes a School of Best Practices with comprehensive
instructions for creating and preserving digital data, demonstration projects from
eleven disparate endangered languages, a database of tools and readings, and a suggested
ontology for language description.
While the data accumulated by these projects remains available, the project interfaces
and consequent project integration have not been updated since moving to the current
host institution. The lecture will review this constellation of resources and set
out the need for technical and content updates, as well as outlining the challenges
in website design, digital language curation, annotation, and preservation that EMELD
faces.
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion led by Helen Arirstar-Dry, Gary
Simons, Alexis Palmer (Assistant Professor, Linguistics, UNT), Sadaf Munshi (Associate
Professor, Linguistics, UNT), Jeonghyun "Annie" Kim (Associate Professor, Information
Science, UNT), Yunfei Du (Professor, Information Science, UNT), and Oksana Zavalina
(Associate Professor, Information Science, UNT).
This lecture and panel discussion will be hosted in room 250H, at Willis Library (225 S. Avenue B, Denton, TX 76201). It will on Thursday, November 16, 2017, from 5:00—7:00 p.m.
Dr. Helen Aristar-Dry is a retired Professor of Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University
and is now an Affiliated Researcher at UT-Austin. She was Principle Investigator on
12 National Science Foundations sponsored projects, including E-MELD. She along with
Anthony Aristar received the Victoria A. Fromkin Lifetime Service Award from the Linguistic
Society of America in 2003.
Her current research interest is in language technology and previously included Linguistic
Stylistics, Pragmatics, and Discourse Analysis.
She is a board member of Elsevier's Scirus Scientific Advisory Board and Advisory
Board Member of the Linguistics Research Center of UT-Austin. She and Anthony Aristar
are the co-founders of the LINGUIST List and she was a Moderator on LINGUIST List
for 23 years. She is a member of the Linguistic Society of America.
Dr. Gary F. Simons is the Chief Research Officer at SIL International and Executive
Editor of the Ethnologue. He is a co-founder of the Open Language Archives Community
and co-developer of the ISO 639-3 standard of three-letter identifiers for all known
languages of the world. A prolific author, his most recent book 'Sustaining language
use: Perspectives on community-based language development' was co-written with Melvyn
Paul Lewis.
His current research interests include Digital linguistic archiving; Markup languages
and text encoding; Computational linguistics; Programming languages;and Historical
and comparative linguistics.
He is a member of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the Association for
Computing Machinery, the Linguistics Society of America, and the Text Encoding Initiative
Consortium.