How can we understand the purposes and objectives of language documentation? What activities are included in this research area? And how does it contrast with a traditional descriptive perspective? These are some of the questions we ask in this course that provide an introduction to documentation linguistics.

Documentation and collaboration

The course also deals with practical and ethical aspects of collaboration with local communities and so-called CBOs (Community-Based Organizations). 
One of the issues that is problematized is the ethical aspects of initiating and implementing documentation projects in economically weak areas with sparsely documented and often threatened minority languages.
The course also deals with some of the specific activities that are included in documentation work, such as corpus creation, long-term archiving and making primary data available.