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The Native American On-line Dictionary Project

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. The big picture Digitizing data Multipurposing Conclusions.

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The Native American On-line Dictionary Project

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  1. 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

  2. Overview • The big picture • Digitizing data • Multipurposing • Conclusions

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. General technical consequences • Java applets for character display • Server-side database as flexible as possible

  7. Dictionaries • Tohono O’odham (Papago) • Navajo • Hiaki (Yaqui)

  8. 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

  9. 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.

  10. Hiaki • Maria Amarillas • Trilingual Hiaki-English-Spanish dictionary • Multiple interfaces possible and required for different user populations. • No special characters

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

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