Research Protocols

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Project Work

1. Most of the data and analysis stems from Dwyer’s 2000-2006 VW-DOBES collaborative documentation project, for which institutional review board approval was also obtained. Speakers and singers chose to have themselves recognized for their contributions or anonymized; DOBES team members are recognized for their contributions as recordists and/or annotators. We thank the Volkswagen Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Programme for it support of this important basic research.  Other foundations supporting the data used here include the US Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hays Grants (1991-1993), which supported much of the Salar and Northwest Chinese data used here; the Humboldt Foundation, and a previous NSF/NEH-DEL fellowship.
2. Some of the data stems from the fair use of portions of published works. We keep careful records (down to the morpheme) of the sources of our information, so as to credit scholars for their contributions.  Full bibliographic records are available on this site.
3. Some of the data here will be the result of new in-situ research in northern Tibet, primarily on Salar. Prof. Ma and the PI use an informed consent script with speakers. This script states that participants will be anonymized and that no interpersonally negative or political material will be recorded. As a guideline, the ethics statement for fieldworkers in the Leipzig Uni­versity Institute of Linguistics (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~ff/ethicguidelines.html) will be followed. Part of Year 1’s collaboration in China will entail drawing up protocols concerning project dat\a access and the authorship of research publications. These proto­cols are subject to revision by project team members.

Institutional Review Board

The project received University of Kansas Human Subject Committee (Lawrence) approval:

2/4/11
HSCL #19172
Arienne Dwyer
ANTH
622 Fraser Hall

The Human Subjects Committee Lawrence Campus (HSCL) has reviewed your research project application 19172 Dwyer  (ANTH) Interactive Inner Asia: Documenting an Endangered Language Contact Area and approved this project under the expedited procedure provided in 45 CFR 46.110 (f) (6) Collection of data from voice, video, digital, or image recordings made for research purposes.  As described, the project complies with all the requirements and policies established by the University for protection of human subjects in research.  Unless renewed, approval lapses one year after approval date.

Data Management Plan

Data formats conform to best-practice standards (e.g. are archived in Unicode-compliant, cross-platform and non-prop­rietary formats). These “data” refer to all analytic databases as well as the multimedia, annotated text data, and associated metadata and other documentation. Much of the latter is already archived at the DOBES archive (MPI-Nijmegen).

The collaborative work in China planned in the current project entails collaboration with scholars at the Qinghai Nationalities University (QNU). Copies of our work in China will be shared. On the website, only anonymized materials for which we have speaker permission and HSCL approval will be posted; we remain flexible on the website’s contents until the entire team has held discussions in China on acceptable contents.