The creation of an online database of audio and textual materials related to the indigenous languages of Latin America, many of which are endangered or already extinct.

The processing and digitization of eight collections of archived documentation for endangered languages in Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador, which express and preserve knowledge of culture, history, and ecology in this part of South America. Materials would be accessioned by the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America and made available to researchers and the public.

This project will gather together, curate and digitize a set of eight significant collections of South American indigenous languages, the results of decades of research by senior scholars; the collections will be archived at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America. These materials constitute an important resource for further linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnomusical research, and are of high value to community members and scholars. They include six legacy collections from the Upper Rio Negro region of the northwest Amazon (Brazil and Colombia), and two collections focused on Ecuadorian Kichwa, most notably the Ca'ar variety. All of the languages concerned are endangered or vulnerable to varying degrees, and the collections are heavily focused on threatened forms of discourse, such as ritual speech and song. Of the Upper Rio Negro set, the collections of Elsa Gomez-Imbert, Stephen Hugh- Jones, and Arthur P. Sorensen, Jr. include the East Tukanoan languages Bar' (bao), Barasana (bsn), Eduria (bsn, widely agreed to be distinct from Barasana), Karapana (cbc), Tatuyo (tav), Makuna (myy), and Tukano (tuo). The collections of Howard Reid and Renato Athias are focused on Hup (jup, Naduhupan), while Reid's collection also contains a few materials from two languages of the wider region, Nukak (mbr, Kakua-Nukakan) and Hot' (yua, isolate). Robin Wright's collection involves Baniwa (bwi, Arawakan). Of the Ecuadorian Kichwa set, Judy Blankenship's and Allison Adrian's collections are both focused on Ca'ar Highland Kichwa (qxr, Quechuan), while Adrian's also includes some material from Loja Highland Kichwa (qvj, Quechua).

Digital archiving of Mexican, Central, and South American linguistic materials to be made accessible by The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA).

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a Web-based repository of multimedia materials that are digitize in accordance with international standards and are made accessible to scholars and speaker communities worldwide. In collaboration with the eight linguists who have collected materials over the last 40 years, the project staff would digitize and preserve recordings and written materials that document languages of Costa Rica, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico.

A Foundations pilot project to transcribe materials in Mixtec, a pre-Columbian language spoken in south-central Mexico, and that are housed at the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America.  Working with undergraduate linguistics students and Mixtec community members who have migrated to southern California, the applicant would undertake transcription of hand-written documents and audio recordings to make them searchable, thereby improving access and reuse. 

The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) has thousands of images of handwritten manuscripts whose text cannot be searched, making them difficult for users to discover and access. Since many of these documents are transcriptions or translations of recordings in AILLA's collections, improving access to a manuscript increases access to other media. This project pilots a low-cost process to improve access to resources in AILLA's collections by crowdsourcing the transcription of select handwritten documents written in Mixtec languages using open-source software. It will be implemented in an undergraduate linguistics course at UT, for which lesson plans will be developed, and within a Mixtec speech community in California, in an effort to develop a community of practice. More broadly, investigators will disseminate findings among other digital archives so they may adapt the approach to any language.