Valuing technology

Work in language documentation has forced linguists to carefully consider how new technologies can best serve the goal of preserving languages and language data. Properly addressing these concerns, however, is not simply a matter of assessing how well these technologies can serve documentary ends. Rather, linguists must also consider what the precise goals are for their documentary projects and how those goals align with their professional values. This paper examines this problem by trying to determine the values that underlie two prominent lines of work on language documentation, one focused on issues of long-term data preservation and the other on the kinds of resources that the linguist should collect and create in the field.