Paulina Bounds
University of Georgia
Panel: “Finding the Words: The Digital Linguistics Database”

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Video of this event is hosted at the Internet Archive.

This paper is a case study of how to create a digital audio archive which can be used by both scholars and the general public based on Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States turned into digital media. LAGS will be publicly available, with over 7000 hours of linguistic interviews illustrating how language was spoken in the 70s throughout the southeast United States. Reel to reel tapes with the interviews were digitized into uncompressed .wav format, so they could be used for acoustic phonetic analysis. The files were then divided into 4 to 5 minute segments and labeled to create an index. The segments were then converted into .mp3 audio files so they could be easily downloaded in a reasonable time via the Internet. Digitally archiving LAGS permitted long term preservation since the audio tapes have long past their rated life. Possible applications of this database include language analysis, cultural analysis of the informant’s stories and documentation of historical information provided during interviews