Submissions/Birth of a project to preserve a 2500 years old language

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.
2008
Title of the submission
Birth of a project to preserve a 2500 years old language
Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)
Presentation
Author of the submission
Subhashish Panigrahi
E-mail address
psubhashish@gmail.com
Username
psubhashish
Country of origin
India
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Centre for Internet and Society
Personal homepage or blog
psubhashish.com
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Age and literary heritage of a language often does not help for any digital archival, linguistic and academic research but political and societal movement do. For a language like Odia that is the oldest language (over 2,500 years old) in eastern India and a descendent of the lingua franca of huge and powerful kingdom of South Asia, there is not much initiative for any kind of historical research, higher academic research programs, and digitization of old text either by the government or any university. Apart from one or two organizational projects there was no systematic digitization project for Odia until Odia Wikisource was born. It took almost two years to bring interest around it and build a community, acquiring content from copyright holders, scanning rare books that have a last few copies left, pilot an education program in an institution for a medium-scale digitization. Odia Wikisource finally went live.

In this presentation, I will be contrasting languages that have federal support, and linguist and researcher communities working to make more usable with languages lacking all of such support. Many languages are in the verge of extinction. I will be sharing case studies of acquiring content, negotiating with authors/publisher/copyright holders to relicense the content under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, and designing academic education programs for digitization from the experience of building a community for about two years and working with an institution for three months. There will be a lot of parallels and learning curve across countries and communities to shape the takwaways for the participants. For the second half of the presentation, there will be brief brainstorming about copyright migration to Creative Commons licenses, institutional partnership, and implementing online and offline Digitization Education Programs.

Track
WikiCulture & Community
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
30 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Yes
Slides or further information (optional)
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