Open Text Collections

• Christian Döhler (BBAW, editor-in-chief)
• Rogier Blokland (Uppsala)
• Matt Coler (Groningen)
• Nick Emlen (Groningen)
• Diana Forker (Jena)
• Jeff Good (Buffalo)
• Karolina Grzech (València)
• Andreas Hölzl (Potsdam)
• Carolyn O’Meara (Mexico City)
• Kilu von Prince (Düsseldorf)
• Michael Rießler (Joensuu)
• Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Jerusalem)

Next to grammars and dictionaries, text collections are one of the three elements of the Boasian trilogy of language description. The series Open Text Collections publishes outstanding text collections. Next to pdfs and printed books for regular reading, the texts are available as structured research data in CLDF format as well. For more information, see http://opentextcollections.org.

Text collections submitted to Open Text Collections should be a coherent set of curated and edited texts. While we do not give strict limits, 10 texts would be a good start. We are building conversion pipelines for ELAN and FLEx data. If you are considering publishing a text collection, please use the templates provided below

• Proposal template odt
• Proposal template docx

OpenTextCollections recommends that authors and/or compilers of text collections archive not only the interlinearized and edited texts, but also the source materials from which these are created. This may include audio-visual footage, transcription files, and/or scans of notebooks in case of legacy material. In the spirit of good empirical science and good data provenance, the source material should be made available for future research and for future generations of speakers. For collections drawn together from the original documentary work of the contributor(s), we strongly encourage archiving the source recordings with a reputable archive so that these records are discoverable, available to the public, and preserved for future generations. We recommend selecting an archive from the DELAMAN network, a network of trusted archives for endangered languages and musics. Some archives have a particular regional focus that might be most appropriate to your collection, others are open to collections from anywhere in the world. You can search for member archives on the DELAMAN site and find more information about each archive on their individual websites. For contributors who do not have another archive preference, the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) has generously offered to support the Open Texts Collections initiative by accepting collections from OTC contributors. To learn more about archiving with ELAR, please reach out directly via email to: elar@elararchive.org

Text collections should involve a translation into a language of wider communication. This will often be English, but could also be Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian etc. We encourage compilers to choose languages which will allow people in the relevant region to interact with the text collection. It is possible to have translations into more than one language, eg English and Portuguese for languages from Brazil.

otc@langsci-press.org