Software for Enriching Endangered Language-annotated Databases with Crowd-sourced Linguistic and Cultural Input

This proposal seeks to further develop a software tool and to advance three critical fieldwork projects that will be used to test and improve it. A major gap exists today in the electronic ecosystem for fieldworkers and other linguists who use software such as Toolbox and FLEx, among others: There is still no automated method for sharing projects containing interlinearized glossed data and a lexicon in a way that enables complex searches, nor is it possible to elicit feedback on such data from native speakers and others through the Internet. KRATYLOS is a working proto- type of a web interface for browsing and searching through lexicons and corpora created in XML formats. This tool complements rather than competes with existing database software. KRATYLOS is presently designed to piggy-back on SIL's Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx), which has a large international and highly active user community, by replicating its powerful search features for Internet users. Using KRATYLOS, an XML export of a FLEx project is transformed into a linked online concordance and dictionary, complete with audio and video media. Most importantly, it will allow front-end users to suggest fixes, new entries and analyses to the project administrator. It follows a model of "tempered crowdsourcing" by which users can suggest fixes but not alter the underlying database. These suggestions can then be imported by the administrator back into the database, whether it is a FLEx project or a simple spreadsheet. We propose to develop KRATYLOS into a generalized conversion tool that can take any XML lexicon and interlinearized text collection as its input and produce online linked corpora and lexicons as its output.