Building trust on Zoom: A workflow for language documentation via videoconferencing software

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the capacity to conduct linguistic fieldwork in person. For many fieldworkers, this meant they needed to adapt, and do so urgently. This paper discusses a language documentation workflow based entirely on the online conferencing software Zoom, in which a linguist, external to the community, establishes a new project together with a native-speaker community member. The paper describes how such a working relationship can be built online, and accounts for all the steps of the authors’ Zoom-mediated workflow in detail allowing for their replication. It also offers a critical appraisal of this workflow from the perspectives of both the native speaker and the researcher. To conclude, the authors summarise all the conditions necessary for a workflow like this one to be successful.