Essentials of Language Documentation

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    Arienne M. Dwyer 

ideal circumstances scientific research has thus contributed to both cultural 

and economic development. 

 

 

4.2.

  

Organization 

 

Though an entire chapter could be written on project organization, we will 

restrict ourselves to two brief remarks on management. The first is time 

management. Building a cooperative work team is much more time-

consuming (but also more rewarding) than working alone. Allow three 

times as much time as you estimate for a project of any size. Secondly, a 

linguistic research project entails both data  and personnel management. 

While under older colonialist models, outsider-researchers would typically 

be responsible for both, the experience of diverse cooperative research pro-

jects has shown that the more local partners manage both data and person-

nel, the more likely it is that these community members consider them-

selves genuine shareholders in the project. And if local partners consider it 

their own project, then it has a much greater chance of being self-sustaining 

and self-perpetuating after the external funding runs out. Thus, if appropri-

ate to the local situation, make sure that local team members with a talent 

for organization are actually managing the project; make sure that they 

have mirror archives of any annotated data archived elsewhere.  

  

 

5.   Conclusions 

 

There is… an inherent contradiction…, namely that we have predefined the 

issues … in a non-aboriginal context. The concepts of intellectual property 

and heritage resources arise out of a way of viewing the world that either 

excludes or is antithetical to that of many First Nations and therefore pre-

cludes a real understanding of aboriginal culture and society.  

(Marsden 2004, by permission) 

 

Clearly, a grasp of the legal requirements for both the researcher-consultant 

relationship (informed consent) and for the data produced and analyzed 

(e.g. copyright and access) is important for any project. Such requirements 

are complex since they involve a web of participants subject to laws often 

of more than one country. But it is the attentiveness to ethical issues which 

can determine a project’s success. If the researcher is an outsider, the real 

challenge lies in learning and mediating between at least two ethical sys-

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Chapter 2 – Ethics and practicalities of cooperative fieldwork and analysis    

61 

tems: that of the researcher, and that of the community. Only with an un-

derstanding of both systems – and this applies equally to outsider-

academics

19

 and insider-community members – can ethical and honorable 

behavior be determined and evaluated. 

 

 

Notes 

 

1.  References to unpublished papers and web resources on ethics and rights are 

listed at the end of this chapter. 

2.  The following adage is useful if raffish: assume makes an ass out of u and me. 

3.  For example, in the dominant legal systems of Europe and North America, it is 

often assumed that a speaker owns the rights to a translation of her text, yet in 

fact she usually does not, if the translation was done by someone else. (The 

speaker must first of course be asked permission to publish the translation.) In 

an aboriginal context, the concept of data “ownership” itself may not even ex-

ist. 

4.  Cf. Kenan Malik’s 2000 article “Let them die” Online:  

 

http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/die.html

 

. 

5.  The DoBeS groups, for example, have used both normative and non-normative 

solutions: for fieldwork, many individual teams relied on the non-normative 

list method. At the same time, participants in the pilot projects developed an 

overall ethics and rights framework for not only fieldwork teams but including, 

importantly, the archivist and the end users. A summary of the rights issues 

they identified is Hiß 2001; a later, amended version appeared as Wittenburg 

2001–2004.  

6.  Annotation solely in linguistic transcription and/or very theoretical linguistic 

tiers (e.g. prosody and syntax) would be impractical for the vast majority of 

speaker-community members. If other tiers are included (e.g. a practical or-

thography tier and a translation into the major regional language), however, the 

additional inclusion of linguistics-oriented tiers is not at all problematic.  

7. 

The American Sociological Association’s statement reads in part:  

 

(a) Sociologists do not use deceptive techniques (1) unless they have deter-

mined that their use will not be harmful to research participants; is justified 

by the study’s prospective scientific, educational, or applied value; and that 

equally effective alternative procedures that do not use deception are not 

feasible, and (2) unless they have obtained the approval of institutional re-

view boards or, in the absence of such boards, with another authoritative 

body with expertise on the ethics of research. 

 

(b) Sociologists never deceive research participants about significant aspects of 

the research that would affect their willingness to participate, such as 

physical risks, discomfort, or unpleasant emotional experiences. 

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