The Chol Collection of Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez and Jessica Coon
The SSILA Archiving Award committee was very happy to recommend that Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez and Jessica Coon receive the Archiving Award for their “Chol Collection of Juan Jesús Vázquez Álvarez and Jessica Coon” at AILLA.
Praise from letters of recommendation include..."This collection is unusually rich in both the range of linguistic materials included and their ethnographic embedding...The corpus includes narrative, personal anecdotes, traditional stories, legend, and historical events from different villages from the region...It includes several generations of Ch’ol speakers. It can thus represent the dramatic changes in the language and its functional ranges over the past decades. The archival materials are unusually well described and annotated, with detailed metadata and a mix of different levels of transcription. The archive is determinedly multimodal, including both audio recordings, but also videos (rarely part of language archives, a serious deficiency both theoretically and descriptively), and transcriptions, glosses, and exemplary ethnographic notes—some of which are only implicit in the texts, narratives, and activities presented."
"The Chol Collection archive is also complemented by a much more accessible web resource, itself a work in progress, and an especially attractive inspiration for as yet unimagined collaborative projects in the (probably near) future, as younger Ch’ol speakers realize how they can extract from the archived materials resources to be reused linguistically, culturally, and artistically."
The archive is housed at the Archives of Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin.
The 2019 SSILA Archiving Award Committee was Andrew Garrett (chair), Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, Patience Epps, and Susan Gehr. If you are interested in serving on this committee in 2020, please contact the SSILA Secretary.
The call for submissions for the 2020 SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss will be in April and deadline for submissions is July 15. More information about the award can be found at SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss. We encourage young and established scholars, individual or a group, in and outside of academia, to apply.