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Abstract:
The last ten years has seen the linguistic scientific domain gain a new, though now established, sub-domain of Language Documentation. Within this sub-domain, media recordings of specific linguistic events are collected, with the aim of creating a well documented and lasting record of the language. Usually the language in focus is endangered, but other reasons for documentation exist, e.g. cross lingual or cognitive research. Therefore the need to store these media resources in trusted, digital archives is growing. At the MPI for Psycholinguistics, 40 terabytes of language data are archived, including resources collected in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and French Polynesia. The media resources have been enriched with transcriptions and translations, described with metadata, and can be viewed through an online archive browser.
Furthermore, for some of the Oceanic languages in the archive (Yelî Dnye, Savosavo, Marquesan, Tuamotuan), multimedia dictionaries and conceptual ontologies have been developed using two of the MPI enrichment tools: LEXUS and ViCoS. With LEXUS, researchers may create lexica in shared online workspaces, enrich lexical entries with multimedia and apply visual formatting. ViCoS is the extension of LEXUS with which users may convert the dictionary list into a conceptual space which visualizes the relations between the objects in the word list.
Our paper will present the MPI archive with examples from Oceania; we will further demonstrate the LEXUS and ViCoS tools with examples from the multimedia dictionaries and conceptual spaces created with and by the researchers of the mentioned languages.
