Transcript O’odham, Navajo, and the Web - E-MELD

The Native American On-line
Dictionary Project
• The Online Dictionary Team:
– Maria Amarillas, Sonya Bird, Michael
Hammond, Heidi Harley, Melody Jeffcoat,
Mizuki Miyashita, Laura Moll, Mary Willie,
Ofelia Zepeda
Overview
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The big picture
Digitizing data
Multipurposing
Conclusions
Specific Project goals
• To develop online searchable dictionaries of
Native American languages spoken in the
southwest.
• The dictionaries should be suitable for
language teaching, research, and use by
native speakers.
• We should be able to produce printable
dictionaries where allowed and where
required.
Larger goals
• The dictionaries should encourage the
development and maintenance of Native
American languages.
• The dictionaries should provide a model of
how traditional cultural knowledge is
compatible with a high-tech modality like
the web.
Assumptions
• Target audience includes many people who
will probably not know how to configure
their computers for our pages.
• Target audience includes people who do not
have computers or web access at home.
Hence we cannot assume that the user can
install relevant software or font packages.
General technical consequences
• Java applets for character display
• Server-side database as flexible as possible
Dictionaries
• Tohono O’odham (Papago)
• Navajo
• Hiaki (Yaqui)
Tohono O’odham
• Mizuki Miyashita & Laura Moll
• A Dictionary of Papago Usage.
– (Mathiot, Madeleine. 1973. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press)
– optically scanned and edited by hand!
• O’odham has several special characters in
its official orthography
Navajo
• Sonya Bird
• Navajo also uses special characters in its
official orthography
• No suitable dictionary to scan.
• Is a usable print dictionary impossible for
Navajo?
• Mary Willie’s pedagogical materials for
Navajo.
Hiaki
• Maria Amarillas
• Trilingual Hiaki-English-Spanish dictionary
• Multiple interfaces possible and required for
different user populations.
• No special characters
XML and SQL
• XML is quite nice for representing
linguistic data, but it is extremely awkward
to use an XML model for dictionary access:
DOM and SAX.
• We have therefore moved to a “database”
model, using MySQL for our database
server. The Hiaki dictionary is accessed
using HTML forms through a Python-based
CGI program.
Multipurposing
• These web-based dictionaries can also be
the basis of print dictionaries.
• On the technical side, we have an XSLT
program that can convert the XML version
of the O’odham dictionary to LaTeX, which
prints quite elegantly.
• We also are coordinating with Ofelia
Zepeda, who has a grant to produce a new
print dictionary of O’odham.
Conclusions
• Online dictionaries can satisfy many
different populations simultaneously.
• Getting usable dictionaries on the web is not
an easy thing.
• Different technical models have different
virtues (XML vs. SQL).
• Online dictionaries can help produced better
print dictionaries.