SHI lecture to explore technology's role in Indigenous language revitalization

Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) will sponsor a presentation next week as part of its spring lecture series featuring prominent voices in Indigenous knowledge, art, culture and language.

Rolando Coto-Solano, a linguist specializing in computational tools for Indigenous languages, will present his talk, “Empowering Community Language Workers with Technology.”

Coto-Solano will speak about collaborations between communities, linguists and computer scientists that are accelerating documentation and revitalization efforts. He will highlight tools such as speech recognition, parsing and morphological analysis that have been co-developed with Indigenous communities in the Pacific, Costa Rica and Arizona. The presentation will also explore emerging futures for technology-supported language work grounded in community needs and principles of data sovereignty.

Coto-Solano is from Costa Rica and serves as an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. He is a member of the Advancing Indigenous Language Technologies (AILT) Working Group—a coalition of academic and community language workers launched in 2023 to support the development of language technologies that serve Indigenous language communities.

The lecture is scheduled for noon, Monday, April 28, in Shuká Hít within the Walter Soboleff Building, 105 Heritage Way, in Juneau. The event will be livestreamed and posted on SHI’s YouTube channel.

Sealaska Heritage Institute is a tribal organization founded in 1980 to perpetuate and enhance Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian cultures of Southeast Alaska. SHI also conducts scientific and public policy research that promotes Alaska Native arts, cultures, history and education statewide. The institute is governed by a Board of Trustees and guided by a Council of Traditional Scholars, a Native Artist Committee and a Southeast Regional Language Committee.

CONTACT: Kathy Dye, SHI Communications and Publications Deputy Director, 907.321.4636, kathy.dye@sealaska.com.

SHI lecture to explore technology's role in Indigenous language revitalization

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