More recently, researchers have begun to recognize the immense potential available in the archived data as a source for linguistic analysis, so that the field has become of increasing importance for typologists, but also for neighbouring disciplines. The present volume contains contributions by practitioners of language documentation, most of whom have been involved in the Volkswagen Foundation's DoBeS programme (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen).
The topics covered in the volume reflect a field that has matured over the last decade and includes both retrospective accounts as well as those that address new challenges: linguistic annotation practice, fieldwork and interaction with speech communities, developments and challenges in archiving digital data, multimedia lexicon applications, corpora from endangered languages as a source for primary-data typology, as well as specific areas of linguistic analysis that are raised in documentary linguistics.
Geoffrey L. J. Haig, Universität Bamberg, Germany; Nicole Nau, Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza, Posnan, Poland; Stefan Schnell, Universität Kiel, Germany; Claudia Wegener, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie Leipzig, Germany.