CRCL Inc.
Annual Report, 2007
This year’s activities included:
· The Mon-Khmer Languages Project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Division of Preservation and Access) for 2007 – 2009. Receipt of this prestigious grant was extremely gratifying, and reflects not only very hard work by CRCL, but also the willingness of leading scholars around the world to collaborate in this important effort. The project director is Dr. Paul Sidwell, with Doug Cooper co-directing.
The project will assemble a century of collected data, linking it to modern comparative analyses, and making it accessible for research and reference. The project’s primary goals are:
o Mon-Khmer languages database: makes lexicographic reference material (ultimately on some 150 MK languages), including phonetic transcription, glosses, citations, and links back to original printed data, freely available.
o Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary: is an on-line hierarchical reference that puts language data in historical context. It is based on – and ultimately greatly extends – H.L. Shorto's Mon-Khmer Comparative Dictionary.
o Mon-Khmer languages worksite: ensures rapid and reliable publication of funded work. It manages a collaborative architecture for access, analysis, comment, correction, and peer-certification of database and dictionary data.
· The SEAlang Lab: Assistive Technology for Reading, Writing, and Vocabulary Acquisition in Complex-Script Languages proposal, submitted to the International Research and Studies program of the US Department of Education, completed its first (of 3) years (Oct. 2006 – Sept. 2009). The SEAlang Lab builds tools for reading, writing, and vocabulary acquisition for complex-script, less commonly taught languages.
In 2007, a series of workshops were held with our primary collaborators; the workshop theme was ‘Design and Functionality.’ Meetings were held at:
o Foreign Service Institute, Washington D.C. (April 25).
o Defense Language Institute / Foreign Language Center, Monterey (May 4).
o Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (also host of SEASSI, the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute) (April 27).
· The Southeast Asian Languages Library (SEAlang Library) completed its second year of funded work under the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access program of the US Department of Education (Oct. 2005 – Sept. 2009). To date, bilingual dictionaries for Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Burmese have been brought on-line. As anticipated, the SEAlang Lab and the Mon-Khmer Languages Project exemplify the potentiating role of the SEAlang Library: helping to make new projects practical by providing enabling data and software infrastructure.
· The CRCL Inc. Outreach Program assisted the following projects:
o Provided extensive assistance to Prof. Philip Jenner (U Hawai’i, emeritus) on two projects: his massive dictionaries of the pre-Angkor and Angkor inscriptions (edited by Doug Cooper, and to be published this year by Pacific Linguistics), and his multi-volume translation and analysis of the inscriptions themselves (probably forthcoming next year).
o Completed the Gordon Luce Papers Project in collaboration with the Australian National Library. This trove of unpublished papers (nearly 10,000 pages) had never been fully cataloged. We have scanned all papers related to Southeast Asian linguistics, and built an on-line Luce Archives (see http://archives.sealang.net/luce ).
o Digitized and built an on-line archives for the past 17 years of publication of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS) conferences. We are also hosting the Society’s website (see http://www.jseals.org ).
· Executive Director Doug Cooper gave a variety of presentations on behalf of CRCL:
o Research Tools for Complex Script Languages (National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages annual conference, Madison Wisconsin, 2007). This presentation discussed the work of the SEAlang Library and Lab with a particular focus on relevance to linguists and researchers, and their potential for supplying research instrumentation for the language professional.
o The SEAlang Archives: Preservation, Discovery, and Access for the `Scattered Literature’ of Southeast Asian Linguistics (17th Southeast Asian Linguistics Society annual conference, University of Maryland; co-author Saowapha Viravong). This presentation discussed preliminary work on this free, on-line resource.
o Data Sharing in the Mon-Khmer Languages Project (3rd International Conference on Austro-Asiatic Linguistics, Pune, India). This presentation discussed and demonstrated tools and on-line resources being built for this project. CRCL and Mahidol University will be hosting the 4th ICAAL in 2009 in Bangkok, Thailand.
· Proposals In 2007 CRCL began advance work on three new projects:
o Lexalia are artifacts and images whose lexical content makes them interesting. The LEXalia Library photographs and scans lexalia, then builds searchable text corpora and indexed image banks for educational and research use. See http://www.lexalia.org .
o Southeast Asia's golden age of epigraphy spanned the 5th through 15th centuries and produced thousands of Cham, Pyu, Mon, Khmer, Burmese, and Tai-family inscriptions. These stone documents tell stories of art, ecology, and economy, and of political, religious, and cultural development in this crossroads region.
The SEAclassics Library will bring this widely dispersed, poorly catalogued, and often inaccessible body of work into the 21st century. Texts will be given a consistent romanized transliteration, XML-tagged for universal on-line access, then linked to every available image, translation, and epigraphic dictionary, and integrated with sophisticated corpus search and analysis software. We have convened an international advisory board of leading scholars in each tradition, and have begun extensive advance work on the Khmer, Thai, and Cham texts.
o The Southeast Asian Linguistics Archives (SEAlang SALA) collects, scans, indexes, and disseminates scholarly publication on Southeast Asian language and linguistics, and devises and tests innovative approaches to aggregating and exposing the field’s scattered literature. Archived texts include festschrifts, conference proceedings, working papers, special collections, and regular and itinerant journals, as well as the extensive unpublished materials – field notes, theses, and unfinished lexicons – that have particular importance to the linguistics community.
· Staffing CRCL’s focus and productivity reflect the expertise and dedication of our contract staff and consultants. These now include Paul Sidwell (Mon-Khmer), Lwin Moe (Burmese, Mon, computing), Frank Smith (lexical resources), Rikker Dockum (lexical resources, Thai), Seang Sokha (Khmer, epigraphy), Noosai Inthimas (Lao, Thai, field office manager), Stephen Morey (Tai languages), and Saowapha Viravong (library/archives).
· In 2008 We continue to work on Southeast Asian lexical resources, and will be seeking continued funding from the Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Submitted January 31, 2008
Doug Cooper
Executive Director, CRCL Inc.