This Thursday (Dec 3) at 4pm during the Fieldwork Lab meeting, Aaron Broadwell (University of Florida) will be presenting “Making historical texts in indigenous languages accessible to communities: A Zapotec case study”. Please email Carol-Rose Little if you would like to attend and do not have access.
Abstract: Caseidyneën Saën is a set of open educational resources on Colonial Zapotec funded by an ACLS grant and created by a team including activists, educators, academics, and students. Here, we present this resource as a case study that contributes to larger conversations related to (1) communities working with historical corpora in their languages (e.g. Leonard 2011, Hinton 2011) and (2) the role digital scholarship can play in such projects (e.g. Czaykowska-Higgens et al. 2014).
Zapotec languages (Otomanguean) are indigenous to Oaxaca and are also spoken in diaspora communities, including in the greater Los Angeles area. Historical forms of Zapotec are attested in an expansive corpus written during the Mexican Colonial period. The online, digital resource Ticha (https://ticha.haverford.edu) makes these manuscripts accessible to the public by providing open access to high-resolution images, transcriptions, translations, linguistic analysis, and historical context. The continued development of Ticha is embedded in pedagogical practices and committed to co-creation with Zapotec individuals and pueblos. In Caseidyneën Saën, a collection of public-facing teaching materials, we use the resources available on Ticha to teach about Zapotec language, culture, and intellectual history.
The e-book Caseidyneën Saën was created by a team comprised of both Zapotec and non-Native collaborators, and the 18 co-authors of this multilingual (English, Spanish, and Zapotec), multimedia presentation represent the diversity of the team. In this talk I discuss how we went from traditional linguistic fieldwork to a deeper immersion into collaborative work with Zapotec communities to provide documents that are relevant to their linguistic history.
George Aaron Broadwell is Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. See more details at https://people.clas.ufl.edu/broadwell/.