4 ms·

The article criticizes the linguist for 1) Being a cranky, arrogant academic - supposing his study of the language trumped elders' pronunciations of those words

by pradn 6y ago

The article criticizes the linguist for 1) Being a cranky, arrogant academic - supposing his study of the language trumped elders' pronunciations of those words, assuming there was a "standard" version of the language that could be reconstructed 2) bequeathing his dictionary and his field-work materials to the American Philosophical Society, where its hard to access the materials, instead of giving them to the Indigenous community or releasing via public domain I think the first one is fair. Perhaps, for the second one, he expected the materials to be easily accessible. That's on the APA, which should at the least put them up online for free in the public domain, sans the restrictions the article talks about. I applaud him for caring enough to try to preserve the language, no matter the flaws. He is a human after all, warts and all.

skissane 6y ago
> which should at the least put them up online for free in the public domain, sans the restrictions the article talks about. The article says: "Some of the oral narratives in the A.P.S. archive, for example, are meant to be shared only by women, or only in winter, or only by elders." Putting the materials up online without restrictions might actually upset the Indigenous community. This is part of why a lot of archives are restricted access – there can be material in them which could be confidential, private, offensive, defamatory, restricted by third party copyrights (e.g. papers or books authored by others with marginal notes added by the scholar), etc. Restricting access to bona fide researchers, you can trust scholars to exercise some professional discretion in dealing with the material. Just dumping it all on the general public isn't doing that. To properly put material like this online, you need someone to digitise it. This involves scanning, quality control (going back and checking the documents are actually scanned correctly), cataloguing the documents (often archives just catalogue the boxes, not the individual documents in each box). Then you need someone qualified to review each document to see if there is any reason why it can't be released – in this case, that would involve consulting the Indigenous community about how they feel about releasing documents which may describe some of their traditional cultural secrets. All this takes a lot of time and money. Consider the archives of APS have not just this scholar's papers, but those of many others, putting all their archives online would likely cost many millions. (If you have a spare few million to donate to them for this, I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you.)
- pradn 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. That's why I said "sans the restrictions the article talks about." He didn't seem to think about the issues of access that have arisen since then. He might have primarily meant these materials to be available to scholars. You are right. We're now in a pickle. No one is saying he shouldn't have done the work. But getting the material to a place where it helps the language thrive is hard and will take resources. No easy answer here.

by pradn 6y ago

skissane 6y ago

> which should at the least put them up online for free in the public domain, sans the restrictions the article talks about. The article says: "Some of the oral narratives in the A.P.S. archive, for example, are meant to be shared only by women, or only in winter, or only by elders." Putting the materials up online without restrictions might actually upset the Indigenous community. This is part of why a lot of archives are restricted access – there can be material in them which could be confidential, private, offensive, defamatory, restricted by third party copyrights (e.g. papers or books authored by others with marginal notes added by the scholar), etc. Restricting access to bona fide researchers, you can trust scholars to exercise some professional discretion in dealing with the material. Just dumping it all on the general public isn't doing that. To properly put material like this online, you need someone to digitise it. This involves scanning, quality control (going back and checking the documents are actually scanned correctly), cataloguing the documents (often archives just catalogue the boxes, not the individual documents in each box). Then you need someone qualified to review each document to see if there is any reason why it can't be released – in this case, that would involve consulting the Indigenous community about how they feel about releasing documents which may describe some of their traditional cultural secrets. All this takes a lot of time and money. Consider the archives of APS have not just this scholar's papers, but those of many others, putting all their archives online would likely cost many millions. (If you have a spare few million to donate to them for this, I'm sure they'd be happy to hear from you.)

pradn 6y ago
Yes, exactly. That's why I said "sans the restrictions the article talks about." He didn't seem to think about the issues of access that have arisen since then. He might have primarily meant these materials to be available to scholars. You are right. We're now in a pickle. No one is saying he shouldn't have done the work. But getting the material to a place where it helps the language thrive is hard and will take resources. No easy answer here.