CoRSAL 2021 Agenda

OCTOBER 1

8:00

  • Doors open

8:30-9:00

  • Greetings, Recap of our year

9:00-10:00

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen 

10:00-10:15

  • CoRSAL Excellence Fund

Eileen Moran, Associate Vice President for Development

Kinshuk, Dean of the College of Information

Shobhana Chelliah, Associate Dean for Research & Advancement/Linguistics

10:20-10:40

  • Social Media and CoRSAL

Merrion Dale

10:45-11:15

  • Panel discussion about use of social media for revitalization/archives

Ken Van Bik, Prafulla Basumatary, Marjing Mayanglambam, Maaz Shaikh, (and presentation by Stephen Morey by video)

11:15-11:30

  • UNT digital library infrastructure and social media formats

Mark Phillips

11:30-11:45

  • Plans for the future

          Oksana Zavalina and Sadaf Munshi

11:45-12:00

  • Closing and thanks

            Shobhana Chelliah

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Keynote abstract

Connecting digital language corpora and stakeholders through social media

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen  (blilleha@haverford.edu; @blillehaugen)

Social media sites, such as Instagram and Twitter, have become spaces of digital language activism, especially for speakers and learners of marginalized languages (Jany 2018, Lillehaugen 2019, Belmar 2020). At the same time, there are growing numbers of online digital language corpora available, such those for South Asian languages (e.g. available through the CoRSAL archives), languages of Australia (e.g. Digital Daisy Bates), and—as discussed further in this talk—Valley Zapotec languages of Oaxaca, Mexico (through Ticha,).  

Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec (Lillehaugen et al. 2016, Broadwell et al. 2020) is a digital scholarship project committed to co-creation with Zapotec individuals and intentional outreach to the larger Zapotec community. The Ticha website makes a large corpus of Zapotec-language archival manuscripts created between 1560-1750 freely available to the public. Zapotec community members, both scholars and non-academics, use these archival resources for various purposes, including language reclamation (Lopez 2020).

In this talk, I share strategies and results in facilitating intentional educational communities on social media as a means of connecting the digital corpus of Colonial Zapotec language texts with diverse stakeholders including Zapotec language activists, Zapotec speakers and learners more broadly, researchers, and students. While social media may not be appropriate for all language reclamation contexts, in our experience it has been a powerful opportunity for multi-directional learning and a means of subverting traditional colonial boundaries, such as classroom walls (Lillehaugen and Flores-Marcial 2022) and the framing of expertise.

Works cited

  • Belmar, Guillem. 2020. Digital presence and language revitalization: Attitudes towards and use of minority languages on social media. In Lydia Sciriha (ed). Comparative studies in bilingualism and bilingual education, 201-218. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Broadwell, George Aaron, Moisés García Guzmán, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Felipe H. Lopez, May Helena Plumb, & Mike Zarafonetis.  2020.  Ticha: Collaboration with Indigenous communities to build digital resources on Zapotec language and history. Digital Humanities Quarterly 14(4). Online: http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/4/000529/000529.html.
  • Jany, Carmen. 2018. The role of new technology and social media in reversing language loss. Speech, Language and Hearing 21 (2): 1—4. DOI: 10.1080/2050571X.2017.1368971.
  • Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle. 2019. Tweeting in Zapotec: social media as a tool for language activists. In Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar & Gloria E. Chacón (eds.) Indigenous Interfaces: Spaces, Technology, and Social Networks in Mexico and Central America, 202—226. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
  • Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, George Aaron Broadwell, Michel R. Oudijk, Laurie Allen, May Helena Plumb, & Mike Zarafonetis. 2016. Ticha: a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec, first edition. Online: http://ticha.haverford.edu/.
  • Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle & Xóchitl Flores-Marcial. 2022 (in press). Extending pedagogy through social media: Zapotec language in and beyond classrooms. To appear in Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.
  • Lopez, Felipe H. 2020. Recovering Knowledge Through Forgotten Words. Campus Compact Blog; Online: https://compact.org/recovering-knowledge-through-forgotten-words/.