Meꞌphaa Language Documentation

I supported and conducted field work in this multi-scholar collaboration documenting the various speech varieties of the Meꞌphaa Genius. The protagonist in this effort was Dr. Steven Marlett. He applied for and was awarded¹ a DEL-NEH fellowship and invited Kevin and me to work on our own, but adjacent projects at the same place and time as he was working on his project. Contextually this was a very interesting project and formative in my scholarly experience.

My major contribution to the research project(s) was three fold: First, I provided audio and video recording technical expertise for the recording of communicative events. Second, I provided file organization and metadata support for all the scholars involved. Third, I helped design and implement the elicitation of social and biographical information for the people who worked with us, so that we could better understand the social dynamics behind the spoken variation we encountered. Contextually this role was very interesting because I functioned as a field archivist and multi-media recording technician working with linguists, yet I also contributed to the overall design of the information collected. This pairing of activites and conceptializing in a single role was not easily articulated at the time, even by me. Commonly understood roles of the time were IT Support and linguist; I fit neither of these pre-concived roles 100%. Therefore, I sometimes say that “being a grammarian of digital file names is the loneliest job of them all”. However, if social expectations among team members can be well established, the inclusion of a field archivist on an interdisciplinary linguistic team can provide significant advantages to information managment and analysis.

While Dr. Steven Marlett’s Fellowship lasted 12 months, my own involvement consisted of two discontinuous three-month stents. Many of the lessons learned and reflections on our project are recorded in short (or longer) blog posts. Significant though are that Kevin Cline used this time to gather data his Masters Thesis, Dr. Marlett would use the knowledge and relationships to write a massive amount of descriptive material and texts on and in the Meꞌphaa speech varieties. These are known as the Meꞌphaa Grammar Files and are published under the SIL Mexico Working Papers series. My own scholarly contribution informed by and influenced through this project would span multiple topics but would include the areas of text input, metadata schemas, project managment, and geo-linguistics (language maps).