Caroline Gihlstorf
September 19, 2021
My background
I’m a student at Haverford College studying Computer Science and Linguistics. I was a research assistant on the Ticha Project during Summer 2021, funded by the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship. My work with Ticha gave me the opportunity to apply my knowledge in both areas of study to various aspects of the project. It was also an opportunity to learn about Ticha’s goals for its resources — specifically around how to make them truly accessible.
My introduction to the Ticha Project
One of the first things I learned about the Ticha Project was that it aimed to make resources accessible. “Great!” I thought. “Free, digitized resources are certainly an example of accessibility.” I still believe this, of course, but after my work with Ticha I realized that my original notion of accessibility only scratched the surface of what the project aims to achieve. Since I was not someone for whom Ticha’s resources are designed, I didn’t have much experience trying to access or navigate them from a user’s perspective. Ticha taught me that accessibility spans many dimensions, and that it is never just enough for a resource to simply exist.
My three main areas of work
My work in Ticha spanned three main areas: encoding transcriptions of texts into XML files (XML is a markup language that assigns labels to text for more advanced software to compute), making small modifications to the Ticha website, and writing a chapter for Caseidnyeën Saën — a textbook with lessons centering around different aspects of Zapotec language, history, and culture. Each of these areas showed me new ways to determine how accessible a resource was, and what could be done to make it even easier to use.
One of the most important things I learned was to center the user, both by seeking feedback and putting myself in the user’s shoes. When I was writing the chapter on how to read a type of linguistic analysis, “accessibility” included not only the existence of the chapter itself, but the language I used to communicate my ideas. After receiving advice to move paragraphs around, reword sentences, and insert more visuals, I realized that my job was not just to write information in a way that I myself could understand, but to cater to an audience who was new to the material and likely nervous about learning it. This was a helpful reminder to consider the reader in addition to the content you want to present to them. It was recommended to me that I include sections telling the reader that although the material seemed scary, they had the ability to learn it. This helped my focus shift from simply producing content to producing content that was inviting to the apprehensive reader.
My work on the Ticha website also helped me realize that availability does not equal accessibility. Links to the Caseidyneën Saën textbook, for example, had been available on the Ticha website, but they sat within a block of text that was uninviting and hard to read. We changed the webpage to include an image, buttons to click for the English and Spanish versions of the text, and replaced the block of text with bullet points describing the text’s content and purpose. We changed nothing about what information the page offered — it was our restructuring that made the information more accessible.
My text encoding work followed a similar trajectory. As I began to encode more and more of the the Aguero Miscelaneo (the text I worked primarily with this summer), I noticed uncoded marginalia (written or typed text in the margins of the main text that are separate from and/or supplementary to it) on most of the pages. I learned that there was not yet an official way to encode marginalia, but I thought it was important to encode it along with the main text — especially the marginalia that was less legible. I proposed a system of marginalia encoding, and began implementing it on the text I was working on. The system is by no means perfect or complete, but it now exists in some form. Taking the position of the reader allowed me to notice this place for improvement.
What I’ve learned through my work
My work with Ticha has shown me that “accessibility” means so much more than creating a resource and making it available. Accessible resources invite users in, are easy to navigate, and can always be improved. I’ve been so fortunate to have received input and feedback on my work from my mentors at Ticha, who have helped make everything I’ve done much better. Feedback — especially from perspectives most implicated by the resources — is most valuable in ensuring that resources are both present and meet their users’ needs, and shows that there is always room to increase accessibility.
Resources and references
Ticha: advancing community-engaged digital scholarship Blog Series. This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts by participants in the 2019 ACLS Digital Extension Grant project “Ticha: advancing community-engaged digital scholarship” (PI Lillehaugen). It was originally published on the Global SL Blog with Campus Compact at https://compact.org/news/rethinking-accessibility-through-a-summer-internship-in-computational-linguistics. The entire series of 14 posts, published between February 2020 and September 2021 are republished on Ticha’s blog and linked below:
Post 1: Long awaited beginnings, Lillehaugen
Post 2: Indigenous Voices in Pedagogical Materials: Zapotec Number Systems and Indigenous Epistemologies, Flores-Marcial
Post 3: Undergraduate Uncertainties: Joining Ticha and Rethinking Plans, Kawan-Hemler
Post 4 (Zapotec ver.): Ryien xtenën ra ni nanën steiby quën ra dizh ni mnity, F. Lopez
Post 4: Recovering knowledge through forgotten words, F. Lopez
Post 5: Social Media and Zapotec Language, Kadlecek
Post 6: 2020 Conversatorios on Colonial Zapotec, Guzmán
Post 7: Increasing Access to Knowledge through TEI encoding, Park
Post 8: Lowering Barriers to Access by Raising Understanding, Zarafonetis
Post 9: OaxaCalifornia Virtual Life: Reproducing Zapotec Culture and Language, J. Lopez
Post 10: Building a Virtual Zapotec Community: A Perspective from Koreatown, Los Angeles, Vasquez
Post 11: The Collaborative Creation of Open Educational Materials as a Pedagogical Practice and Act of Resistance, Lillehaugen
Post 12: Lessons from Caseiyneën Saën: Creativity, Resilience, and Collaborative Scholarship, Plumb
Post 13: Estudiantes Indígenas, Multilingües y Virtuales, Molina
Post 14: Rethinking Accessibility through a Summer Internship in Computational Linguistics, Gihlstorf
Credits and contributors
Published: September 19, 2021
Author: Caroline Gihlstorf
Reformatted by: Dahlia Le Tourneau
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, the Ticha team can be reached at tichaproject@gmail.com.