Assessing the Digital Repository: Holistic Evaluation of a Language Documentation Technology

The digital repository is a component of language documentation which is of increasing importance. At the same time, it is a relatively new technology. Digital repositories serve to protect the linguistic (and, at the same time, cultural) resources of a community, often for both scientific inquiry and local use, and usually long into the future. This work is a broad, critical assessment of the digital repository as a technology. This is carried out by proceeding through a set of questions which are designed to be applicable to any technology. Through this question-asking exercise, the digital repository is examined from social, moral, ethical, practical, vocational, metaphysical, political, aesthetic, and ecological angles. What emerges are major themes including the incommensurability of archived materials with the language itself, the critical role accessibility of the archived materials plays in making digital repositories better technology overall, and the fact that the effects of the digital repositories are largely unknown and, to some extent, unknowable. Finally, actions which the linguist may take in response to what has been learned are listed.