About Us

The Computational Resource for South Asian Languages (CoRSAL) is a digital archive of audio, video, and text files of the minority languages of South Asia and neighboring regions. These source files are most often accompanied by derivatives files such as time-aligned transcriptions and translations, acoustic analyses, word lists, dictionaries, notes on grammatical structure, and analytic aids. CoRSAL is an associate member of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN).

CoRSAL has the following organizational structure:

  • Founding director (Shobhana Chelliah)
  • CoRSAL Board of Advisors (Shobhana Chelliah, Sadaf Munshi, Oksana Zavalina, Mark Phillips, Ana Roeschley)

CoRSAL UNT is overseen by Information Science and Libraries faculty at UNT and focuses on library and information science research.

CoRSAL IU is directed by Shobhana Chelliah who has overall responsibility for CoRSAL at both institutions.

CoRSAL activities include:

  • Annual symposia (2017-present)
  • An occasional publications series
  • Field experiences in South Asia for US students
  • Training workshops in language documentation and related curriculum development for Indigenous and community language documenters
  • Curriculum development at the intersection of information science and language documentation, including the acquisition, curation, and appraisal of materials, and development and description of collections

CoRSAL activities are funded by:

  • Awards to individual linguists and institutions: per the discipline standard, proposals to the US National Science Foundation and other federal and foundation sources may include budgeting for archiving. When funding is available, depositors pay CoRSAL a fee for archiving. The fee for archiving is waived for those unable to provide funding (true for most depositors from Indigenous communities, independent scholars, or South Asian institutions).
  • CoRSAL Excellence endowment at the University of North Texas
  • Departmental funding from UNT Linguistics and UNT Libraries