EUROTALES aims to establish a new integrated approach to researching and representing the linguistic heritage of Europe as it is preserved and echoes through time and place. Language studies necessarily approach languages individually, both diachronically and synchronically, analysing standards, dialects and variations. EUROTALES departs from a monolingual perspective, seeking to map the complex and intertwined linguistic culture of the continent taking into account the linguistic identities, the vestiges and memories of languages in individuals, and the traces of language on material objects and places.
Languages change according to peoples, contexts and circumstances, helping to define identities and build communities. Negotiated though use, languages coexist in individuals and places as a direct product of social relationships and territorial specificity. No community is ever monolingual: people move and their speech and written cultures are shaped mostly through contact, exchange but also clash and confrontation.
We plan to build a research hub collecting linguistic data relating to 1. Individuals (how many languages live in any one individual) 2. Written culture (mother tongues and written languages in time and place); 3. Objects (how intangible linguistic heritage is transmitted and accounted for by material objects and in the public space).
This research, combined with a workshop to process the data, feeds into EUROTALES - A Museum of the Voices of Europe, a permanent exhibition space at Marco Polo, Sapienza, where our Department and the Sapienza Language Centre are based. The Department is building this space in the context of our Public Engagement mission, the Casa delle Lingue, to disseminate our work online and on site.
Our aim is to give continuous and open access to our findings to the wider community of scholars and to the general public as a way to engage and involve the community into retrieving its heritage.
EUROTALES is a language-without-borders project in both concept and content and constitutes a unique approach to the archaeology of language in two respects:
1) It inaugurates a new, highly innovative research method in language studies, which is the retrieval of linguistic data through the study of how they relate to tangible objects and how they live in individuals. Our traces of voices which form the DIFFUSEUM and our language biographies constitute a bottom-up identification of linguistic heritage retrievable from European territory, which we expect to enable a mapping of documentary linguistic evidence gathered irrespective of the categories traditionally employed by scholarship in historical linguistics.
2) The EUROTALES museum is at the same time the collector of data for advanced research and a tool for its dissemination, engaging the general public and the international community of scholars, both online and on site. It aims at establishing a research centre at a major university involving teaching, research and public engagement, all three being integral parts of each other¿s mission. It is our contention that no institution can successfully research languages without the active participation of the community it serves, and that in order to reach out to the community, academia needs to show the relevance of what it does.
Seeking to establish a multi-linguistic and multi-cultural turn in the fields of sociolinguistics and object studies, EUROTALES creates a methodology that recognises the many languages that resonate in any historical time and community and that no language ever proceeded in an uninterrupted, unidirectional linear way. The Traces, searchable on the website and accessible to the general public through our Diffuseum app on site, will serve as building blocks for itineraries and exhibits of the Marco Polo Museum lab and seminar. In a similar vein, personal data gathered from our students, the public, the community, and through our collaboration with schools and other institutions, and the data collectable from received and consolidated scholarly research (European writers¿ language cultures) retrieved through students¿ assignments, and research coordinated by the Academic staff will be converted into displays. We are committed to foster the collection and description of as many `Language Traces¿ as we can muster, both through our own research and above all, through our partnerships with other projects (EDV, RuneS, Mappola, Latin-East ¿ see below), to be included in our Diffuseum and as linked open data.
Collected data from all components of the databank will serve as a foundation for a formal conceptualization of the field, and for the elaboration of a domain specific ontology aimed at merging our databases, in order to allow complex queries and to foster knowledge integration through the semantic web standards. The ontology will be mapped onto, and extend the CIDOC CRM, a standard model for the description of cultural heritage, thus promoting our view of language as an essential component of cultural heritage.
With this interdisciplinary perspective in mind, we aim at embracing the semantic web paradigm in elaborating a domain specific ontology that can provide a full integration of our three databases into a single knowledge base, thus allowing complex queries and complete interoperability with other knowledge bases. The semantic web is an advanced technology whose aim is to provide a formal representation of a specific knowledge domain, therefore improving data interoperability, reuse, and expressivity. Our ontology, resulting from a formal conceptualization of our knowledge domain, will help give substance, based on identifiable examples, to some basic notions in linguistic research (e.g. bilingualism, diglossia, error, orality, vernacular vs language, etc.). These will be mapped onto the CIDOC CRM, a standard model for the representation of cultural heritage promoted by ICOM, and it will extend it by assessing the importance of languages as pivotal elements of our cultural heritage, linked to both material and symbolic objects. Furthermore, the choice of semantic web technologies will have several practical benefits: our data will be structured and machine readable, thus allowing complex queries and automatic reasoning; and we will embrace the LOD (Linked Open Data) paradigm and FAIR principles, making our knowledge Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.