New Technologies and Contested Ideologies: The Tagish FirstVoices Project
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In December 2004 representatives of the Yukon government and the First People's Cultural Foundation of British Columbia signed an agreement to facilitate the use of digital multimedia technology to archive and teach endangered Native languages.1 "Without initiatives like FirstVoices, indigenous languages and cultural knowledge are at risk of disappearing forever," Yukon premier Dennis Fentie said in a prepared statement.2 The Tagish language website project being conducted by the Carcross Tagish First Nation was funded by this agreement and is one example of the ways Native communities are using digital technologies for cultural and linguistic self-representation.3 In many cases, the use of new media generates wide-ranging discussions concerning cultural values, modes of representation and teaching, and contrasts between Native and non-Native ideologies. This article examines the discourses of the Tagish website team as they formulate an Indigenous language ideology based on traditional values and contemporary responses to language endangerment that contrasts with the approaches of outside agencies. The Tagish website project makes use of digital sound files, photographs, videos, and text. In addition to promoting language revitalization efforts, the new technologies used in this project have also facilitated community control over the representation of the Tagish language and culture. Access to new media has made it possible for the local community to manage and conduct the project, and the technological sophistication of the website lends authority to their efforts. A central concern of the project members has been defining their language ideology as they take control of the representation of their heritage. Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold [End Page 119] Click for larger view Figure 1 Location of Tagish-Tlingt Traditional Territory. Reprinted from The Social Life of Stories: narratives and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory, by Julie Cruikshank. Uesd by permission of the University of Nebraska Press © 1998 by the University of Nebraska Press. [End Page 120] Innis suggested that innovations in communications technology often compel realignment in the monopoly or oligopoly of knowledge.4 Borrowing imagery from Hegel, who wrote, "Minerva's owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk," Innis identified cases where the flowering of culture has come before a final collapse.5 Similarly, the use of digital technologies by Indigenous groups is also facilitating a realignment of authority as local communities are able to represent their own languages and cultures in sophisticated ways. This study is based on our experiences participating in the Tagish FirstVoices project and earlier language documentation initiatives. Between 1992 and 1994 one of us (Moore) conducted language documentation projects for the Yukon Native Language Centre and the Carcross Tagish First Nation. At that time Tagish was already the most endangered Yukon Native language, with only three fluent speakers. In 2004 we assisted the First People's Cultural Foundation with the development of a keyboard and unicode font for Yukon languages, met with them to discuss their projects, and transcribed sound files as the Tagish FirstVoices team recorded them. In December 2004 one of us (Moore) traveled to the Yukon to work with the Tagish project and participated in the project members' discussions. Three main elders were working with the project: Lucy Wren, who may be the only fluent speaker of Tagish, her son Norman James, and Clara Schinkel. Other local elders also provided project oversight or contributed in other ways. Two young adults from the community, Jason Greenaway and Sophia Smith, recorded materials and uploaded them to the Internet. As a linguist working with the project, it was possible for one of us (Moore) to record the discussions of the participants and later interview them in a context of shared trust based on common goals. One of us (Hennessy) conducted an analysis of the FirstVoices projects and reviewed the transcripts of interviews. Our description of this project reflects an outside academic perspective that is informed by the views of community members. Language Ideologies The Tagish...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".