Integration of Linguistic Legacy Data Collections through Digital Scholarly Editions: A Case Study on Vanuatu Languages
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The past two decades have witnessed a substantial increase in computational methods for investigating language diversity and history. The amount of digital data in comparative linguistics, however, is still lagging behind, with existing digitization efforts still mostly relying on the cumbersome labor of typing off data manually. Available Optical Character Recognition tools for automating this task have received relatively little attention in digitizing legacy data in linguistics, even though they are routinely used in other disciplines. At the same time, the editorial work must go beyond plain digitalization to add various layers of analysis and standardization, while recording the full provenance of each data point. We present an efficient and transparent workflow for digitizing legacy data in comparative linguistics and integrating it with larger data collections. As a result, we present a digital scholarly edition of lexical data for Vanuatu languages published by Darrell T. Tryon in 1976.
DOI: 10.17613/bf8x3-2d778
Authors: Rubehn, Arne, Rangelov, Tihomir, Ciucci, Luca, Burgess, John, Rost, Riccardo, List, Johann-Mattis
Institutions: University of Passau, The University of Western Australia
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7108317881