Summary of activities of the theme group 1 “Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures”
Facilitators:
- L. W. Cornelis van Lit
- Cosima Wagner
- David Joseph Wrisley
Members:
- Alíz Horváth
- Kiyonori Nagasaki
- Pascal Belouin
The theme group on “Linguistic and geocultural diversity in digital knowledge infrastructures” cooperated from June 17 to 24, 2020 towards the establishment of a “requirement profile” for multilingually-enabled digital knowledge infrastructures. By "requirement profile" we mean a list of minimal standards for multilinguality that platforms would support to be accessible to different users. We were particularly interested in standards supporting non-Latin scripts.
Our starting point was the awareness that many of us work in internationalized universities, in which researchers use different languages for research, teaching and scholarly communication. However, we share the experience that our institutional infrastructures can fall short in accommodating our linguistic and geo-cultural diversity. It was the aim of the group to bring the general expectations for multilingually enhanced digital knowledge infrastructures together in a more formal “minimum requirement list”, which can be given to library and academic infrastructure managers, software developers and other stakeholders.
We felt it was necessary to first collect representative voices on the status quo of impediments, needs and workarounds/solutions from the community. We published a survey (https://forms.gle/Mih7UmztV4vvbAAJ6 ) via Twitter, the Multilingual DH mailing list and other networks of the theme group members with the following questions:
- What languages (other than English) and scripts do you use in digital environments in your daily work? List them in order of their importance to you.
- What kinds of difficulties do you encounter when you use more than one language and/or non-Latin scripts in a digital environment?
- What would you like to be able to do using your languages that you can't right now? If you can, specify the kind of digital environment (repository, WordPress or other web publishing platform, library catalog, XML editor, e-journal, etc).
- Do you have workarounds to get a task done that would seem to be so simple but is actually not due to difficulties described in the second question of this survey?
The survey was open for 5 days and received 51 responses (incl. contact addresses of respondents who want to collaborate further on the topic).
We shared the analysis of the results among the working group by using a googledoc and presented preliminary results on the final theme group meeting at June 24.
The next steps will be to analyse further the survey results and to prepare a short summary to be published on Zenodo’s “Towards Multilingual DH” community (https://zenodo.org/communities/multilingual-dh/about/) as well as a longer paper with the collaboration of more colleagues to be published in an Open Access DH journal. Furthermore, a derived “practical checklist” for multilingually enabled knowledge infrastructures will be developed.
With time zones spanning the USA to Europe and the United Arab Emirates to Japan, the group collaborated asynchronously most of the time but is looking forward to organising follow-up in person (virtual) meetings and activities in the future. If you are interested in collaborating please send a mail to cosima.wagner AT fu-berlin.de