Managing Data for Theoretical Syntactic Study of Underdocumented Languages

Abstract

—0 —+1 and other areas of West Africa, and still passed down among families there). For purposes of exemplification in this chapter, we primarily orient herein to principles underlying management of elicited material, though these do extend to our treatment of texts. The nature of our specific project— that is, nonIndigenous “outsider” (Ameka 2018) scholars working with Indigenous peoples and with Indigenous languages— informs aspects of data management that we feel are important to note but, given the purview of our chapter, are unable to elaborate on in detail. In particular, this includes taking appropriate steps to ensure that data use is transparent, aligned with language users’ (and, when necessary, broader community) desires and expectations, and that data management and use are done in ways that promote Indigenous sovereignty, selfdetermination, and selfgovernance (see Holton, Leonard, & Pulsifer, chapter 4, this volume, and citations therein for discussion of data management issues specific to working with Indigenous peoples/nations/ communities/families/individuals). Our chapter is organized as follows. In section 2, we discuss aspects of our project pertaining to curating data, touching on themes such as data and file preparation practices that facilitate ease of interaction with the data along a typical syntax research pipeline, which involves cyclic integration of data collection, transcription, exploration, analysis, dissemination, and archiving. This highlights some of the more mechanical aspects of file preparation and management for the purposes of syntactic inquiry. Section 3 turns to conceptual and methodological issues. We reinforce what we see as a need for constant negotiation of descriptive and theoretical needs throughout data collection, which also has implications for data management (e.g., file curation, annotating transcriptions, and performing calls on data) in order to facilitate exploration of grammatical properties. Section 4 concludes.