Mobilizing Metadata: Open Data Kit (ODK) for Language Resource Development in East Africa

Linguistic fieldworkers collect and archive metadata as part of the language resources (LRs) that they create, but they often work in resource-constrained environments that prevent them from using computers for data entry. In such situations, linguists must complete time-consuming and error-prone digitization tasks that limit the quantity and quality of the resources and metadata that they produce (Thieberger & Berez 2012; Margetts & Margetts 2012). This paper describes a method for entering linguistic metadata into mobile devices using the Open Data Kit (ODK) platform, a suite of open source tools designed for mobile data collection