What this website is to become. . .
Think of this space as similar to a bare patch of ground on which a complex beautiful tall building will be standing several years from now (although our work will not take several years). Watch us as we build.
This is the digital home of our project on Quechua as it is used in daily and special situations and events by the people for whom it serves as a home/community language and source of identity. Our team consists of Roger W. Andersen (Director), Jaime Luis Daza (Quechua Specialist), both from UCLA, and Edward J. Garrett (Chief Software Developer) from the Dept. of Linguistics at Eastern Michigan U. Vincent Barletta, of the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese at CU-Boulder, is the webmaster. The project is multipurpose:
1. It will be providing the content of our original 1989-1995 multimedia coursematerial, as well as our new original digital resources to serve the study of one particular language, the variety of Quechua spoken in Bolivia; that is, this web site will gradually be populated by our original 1989 film and supporting material, as well as new selected edited video modules in MPEG-4 and AIFF or WAV formats, among others, accompanied by digital supporting material, such as transcripts linked to the video and audio files, still photographs, and text;
2. These resources are being prepared for use by people who want to learn the Quechua language as it is spoken in its natural sociocultural context, as well as by people who want to use our products for a variety of types of original research – linguistic, anthropological, and other types, depending on the suitability of our audio, video, photographic, and text products for their needs; it is not simply a web-based language learning program, nor is it simply a collection of Quechua "texts" for linguistic analysis;
3. It is also meant to provide a model for discourse-centered learning of language and much more (DC-LL-MM) (to be explicated in later additions to this web site);
4. Finally, it is meant to serve as a model for developing a coherent set of digital resources for any language and its sociocultural counterpart – the people who use it – for a variety of purposes.
Athough the web site is called simply quechua.ucla.edu (Q.U.E.), this is meant to be only one particular application of a digital approach to language in its natural sociocultural context and its study in the sense of language learning as well as in the sense of research. We made the decision to develop this model using Bolivian Quechua over sixteen years ago, when we created our two-hour ethnographic film, UCUCHI, filmed in central Bolivia, and accompanying software and text material as resources for the study of Quechua. So it does make sense that this site is indeed called simply quechua.ucla.edu.
Those who want to learn Quechua can use the site for this and ignore the other sections. Those who are interested in the way we are approaching a digital and multimedia representation of something as complex as a language as well as how people use the language, can come to this site for this purpose alone. Those who are interested in some or all aspects of what is represented by DC-LL-MM or learning of this thing called "language" as part of natural spoken discourse (and much more) can come to this site, as we develop it further, to see what we have to offer.
As of this writing, what is available on this web site is the tiny tip of our iceberg. It is not a simple task to transfer to a web site (a server configured so as to make our multiple objects intelligible and easy to understand), the results of years of work. It is a long and slow process and we appreciate your patience as this site continues to change as it reflects more and more our intentions.
We must prioritize the continuing creation, editing, and preparation of our video and audio recordings in Quechua speaking settings in the center of Bolivia, along with many related still photographs; converting these recordings to the current digital standards – MPEG-4, MPEG-2 and others, for digital video, AIFF and WAV for audio, JPEG TIFF and others for digital photographs, transcribing what constitutes now far more than one hundred hours of video and audio recordings, and more. As we find the time, we will post on this site pieces of our work. Eventually these pieces will constitute a more coherent collection of interrelated materials. We appreciate your patience.