Endangered languages often exist in a situation where they have a dwindling group of mostly older speakers, and their community may be marginalized or otherwise not valued and supported. Because of this already precarious situation, the loss of life among that final group of speakers brings a double tragedy: loss of loved ones, and also […]
What if you fed a machine-learning algorithm a list of ice cream flavor names and tasked it with creating new ones? What if you fed it a bunch of pick-up lines and got it to generate new ones? What would the results be like?
On December 16, 2019, PanLex director David Kamholz spoke at the San Francisco Center for the Book on PanLex and the Internet Archive’s joint project to digitize Balinese palm-leaf manuscripts. You can view a recording of the presentation below, and slides are available here. The presentation introduces Balinese manuscripts, covers technical challenges in supporting Balinese […]
In 2019, Translations Commons published “Indigenous Languages: Zero to Digital”, a guide to creating digital infrastructure for indigenous communities. Using flowcharts and clear instructions, it explains how to create every level of the technology stack required to make a language usable online. This easy-to-understand and ground-breaking resource was co-authored with several partners in language and […]
As we reported in February, we were honored to contribute the entire PanLex Database to the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library™, a 30-million-page archive of civilization contained in a long-duration time-capsule that traveled to the Moon last month aboard the SpaceIL Beresheet lunar lander.