Five Dimensions of Collaboration: Toward a Critical Theory of Coordination and Interoperability in Language Documentation

Abstract

In the literature on best practices of language documentation, “collaboration” has emerged as an important concept. While collaboration between scholars is not usually the norm in linguistics, a theory of language documentation must grapple with its theoretical orientation to collaboration. By reviewing the practices of researchers in other disciplines, this paper identifies five aspects of academic collaboration-coordination, distribution of labor, standards for interoperation, authorship and authority, and feedback—that have special bearing on the enterprise of language documentation. I investigate these as a starting point for linguists and our collaborators to consider critically what documentation project and for the discipline of linguistics.