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This paper is a position statement on reproducible research in linguistics, including data citation and attribution, that represents the collective views of some 41 colleagues. Reproducibility can play a key role in increasing verification and accountability in linguistic research, and is a hallmark of social science research that is currently under-represented in our field. We believe that we need to take time as a discipline to clearly articulate our expectations for how linguistic data are managed, cited, and maintained for long-term access.

The Workshop on Documenting Minority Languages in Nusa Tenggara Timur was held 7-13 May 2018 in Kupang, NTT at the Universitas Kristen Artha Wacana (UKAW). The goal of the workshop was to provide practical training in language documentation for people from Nusa Tenggara Timur with an interest in their local and regional languages, and have the potential to play a major role in documenting these languages. In addition to classroom study, the workshop included three days of field study by eight different teams. These teams visited Desa Bolok (Bahasa Helong), Nekmese and Burain (Bahasa Uab Meto), Pukdale (Bahasa Termanu), and Rote (Bahasa Thie and Bahasa Lole). In addition, Bahasa Abui was studied with Abui speakers living in the Kupang area, and Bahasa Sar was studied with a speaker who was visiting from Pantar. The book contains the initial field reports compiled by each of the eight teams during the three-day field practica. The reports were compiled in a single day on 13 May 2018 and as such should not be considered to be final products. Still, these reports demonstrate the enormous potential of well-trained local documentation teams to complete professional quality documentation in a relatively short amount of time. One of the greatest challenges for documentary linguistics is the lack of capacity, especially in regions were language endangerment is most severe. It is our hope that the workshop participants will continue in their efforts to document local languages and preserve the rich linguistic heritage of NTT.

This chapter demonstrates that the languages of Alor and Pantar share a common origin by applying the comparative method to primary lexical data from twelve languages sampled across the islands of the Alor-Pantar archipelago. More than one hundred proto-Alor-Pantar lexical items are reconstructed. An internal subgrouping based on shared phonological innovations is proposed and is compared to that derived using computational phylogenetic methods. It is argued that the Alor-Pantar group originally came from the region of the Pantar Strait.

This chapter compares kinship terminologies and kinship practices in eight Alor-Pantar languages forming a broad geographic and typological sample of the family. In spite of the close genealogical relationship between the languages, there is surprisingly little evidence of shared (cognate) kinship vocabulary, and the kinship systems exhibit great variation. The westernmost languages distinguish both maternal and paternal cross-cousins (children of opposite-sex siblings) as ideal marriage partners, while at the opposite extreme in the highlands of Alor are found languages which expressly forbid cross-cousin marriage. Even among languages whose kinship systems are roughly similar, the terms themselves are often not cognate. Likewise, cognate terms often have varying semantics across the languages. The current distribution of kinship terminologies suggests a recent drift toward symmetric exchange systems which distinguish both maternal and paternal cross-cousins, perhaps under the influence of neighboring Austronesian languages.

The wider genealogical affiliations of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages have been the subject of much speculation. These languages are surrounded by unrelated Austronesian languages, and attempts to locate related languages have focused on Papuan languages 800 km or more distant. This chapter draws on typological, pronominal, and especially lexical evidence to examine three hypotheses regarding the higher-level affiliations of the Timor-Alor-Pantar languages: (1) the languages are related to the North Halmaheran (West Papuan) languages; (2) the languages are part of the Trans-New Guinea family; and (3) the languages are related to the West Bomberai family, with no link to Trans-NewGuinea more broadly. We rely in particular on recent reconstructions of proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar vocabulary. Of the hypotheses evaluated here, we find the most striking similarities between TAP and the West Bomberai family. However, we conclude that the evidence currently available is insufficient to confirm a genealogical relationship with West Bomberai or any other family, and hence, TAP must be considered a family-level isolate.

The indigenous numerals of the AP languages, as well as the indigenous structures for arithmetic operations are currently under pressure from Indonesian, and will inevitably be replaced with Indonesian forms and structures. This chapter presents a documentary record of the forms and patterns currently in use to express numerals and arithmetic operations in the Alor-Pantar languages. We describe the structure of cardinal, ordinal and distributive numerals, and how operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions are expressed.

As a discipline, archiving is often presented in terms of the competing goals of preservation and access. One could argue that this disconnect between access and usage need not concern an archive. Yet, to dismiss the issue of usage by arguing that materials may eventually become useful is to ignore the great need for immediately useful language materials. If language documentation is being made accessible to communities but not being used, then access alone is not sufficient. Archives must strive for something more than providing access. Bridging the gap between access and usage requires that archive resources be MEDIATED so that they become not only accessible to user communities but also relevant. The concept of mediation as discussed here is in some ways similar to what Nathan (2006) describes as mobilization. However, unlike mobilization, mediation does not require that archive resources be transformed but only that they be presented in a way that they become more relevant. While mobilization involves the creation of derivative products, mediation can be as simple as enriching metadata descriptions with relevant fields or highlighting particularly useful resources within large collections. In particular, mediation requires that the archive knows and works closely with its user community., Language Documentation and Description, Vol. 12 (2014): Special Issue on Language Documentation and Archiving

Witnessing the explosion in the amount of digital data over the past decade many authors have concluded that not everything can be preserved, that we must instead develop strategies for prioritizing objects for digital preservation (Ooghe and Moreels 2009). Digital language archives have been at least partly immune to these arguments, owing both to the nature of the data they preserve and to their status as early adopters. From the outset language archives have worked closely with the documentary linguistics community to develop standards for data portability which greatly simplify preservation and access (Bird and Simons 2003). The products of modern language documentation are by design much easier to archive than, say, eBooks or video games. Moreover, digital language archives have generally had privileged access to large computing infrastructures, often through particular arrangements with cyber-infrastructure built for hard science data storage and analyses. As digital archiving comes of age and digital language archives are brought within the fold of larger digital preservation efforts, the pressure to prioritize preservation goals will increase. Before we decide to discard materials as superfluous, it is useful to consider some of the ways language archives are being used. In this paper I review some current uses of materials housed at the Alaska Native Language Archive (ANLA). Though designed exclusively as a repository of linguistic knowledge, ANLA is now increasingly recognized by its user community as a rich source of ethnographic information. Language documentation is for the most part a holistic effort, and though language documenters may not be specialists in topics such as botany, kinship, or geography, they are often the only ones to record this knowledge. Hence the value of language archives as repositories of traditional knowledge. Of course, ANLA is also a rich source of more traditional linguistic documentation. This is not surprising in cases where little or no published documentation exists. However, increasingly we are discovering important information which was excluded from published reference works, ostensibly because it was not thought to be important at the time. Archival documents have revealed errors and oversights in the published records for even the most well-documented Alaskan languages. While anecdotal, these experiences demonstrate the value of preserving all linguistic data, even in cases where good published documentation exists. Digital language archives must resist pressure from the wider library and archives community to prioritize preservation efforts and triage collection. Fortunately, digital language archives are already ahead of the curve, having developed inter-institutional frameworks which stress regional focus and avoid duplication of preservation efforts (Barwick 2004, AIMS Working Group 2012). On this tenth anniversary of PARADISEC it is encouraging to note the great progress which has been made in the development of digital ethnographic archives; however, we must also be prepared for a new era in which digital archiving is a quotidian effort and we face increasing pressure to discard materials. References AIMS Working Group. 2012. AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship. Barwick, Linda. 2004. Turning It All Upside Down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive. Literary and Linguistic Computing 19.253-63. Bird, Steven and Gary Simons. 2003. Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description. Language 79(3).557-82. Ooghe, Bart, Heritage Cell Waasland and Dries Moreels. 2009. Analysing selection for digitisation. D-Lib Magazine 15(9/10).1082-9873

PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching.