A Worldview in Words: Curation of the Mopan Mayan Oral Literature Archive

Since 1986, Dr. Eve Danziger has been working with speakers of Mopan, an under-documented language of the celebrated Mayan family. Her Mopan digital archive (http://mopan.iath.virginia.edu/) houses over 100 hours of recordings of traditional oral literature. The texts have value for research ranging from grammatical analysis to ethno-historic documentation of events in the pre-European period. Sadly, the generation of Mopan knowledge-holders who spoke these texts has now largely disappeared. But digital repositories hold enormous potential for the curation of cultural texts (cf. https://dh.virginia.edu/project/multepal). Danziger will use CGII funding to support transcription, translation and annotation of texts in the Mopan archive.