Hubs-and-nodes: Decentralized fieldwork for language documentation

Hubs-and-nodes: Decentralized fieldwork for language documentation Presented by Jakob Lesage & Olga Olina at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, 9-11 September 2026 #lda2026 This paper introduces the hubs-and-nodes model, a distributed approach to language documentation. While pandemic-era adaptations have expanded remote fieldwork (e.g. Williams et al. 2021; Grzech & Tisalema Shaca 2022; Rice 2021), documentation efforts still tend to rely on the presence, mobility, and funding of a single researcher. This model makes documentation vulnerable to disruptions in funding, mobility, or political stability, and limits the achievable workload. Drawing on documentation projects in Taraba State, Nigeria, we show how documentation activities can be distributed through existing community networks and strengthened through strategically placed hubs. This approach decentralizes expertise, equipment, and responsibility. Community collaborators, like academic researchers, act as nodes in a distributed network, while hubs give all actors infrastructure, coordination, and networking support: equipment storage and repair, data transfer and backup, training, coordination, and networking across different language communities. Village-based hubs support documentation in rural settings, while urban hubs enable data processing, storage, and cross-community collaboration. We report on projects that have produced two ELAR-archived collections and demonstrate how the model enabled a third, community-initiated project through inter-community collaboration. These cases show that the model works under intermittent access conditions, enables year-round documentation work, and shifts ownership of decisions toward local participants. References Grzech, Karolina & Selena Tisalema Shaca. 2022. Building trust on Zoom: A workflow for language documentation via videoconferencing software. Language Documentation & Conservation 16. 79–97. Rice, Alexander. 2021. Using YouTube as the Primary Transcription and Translation Platform for Remote Corpus Work. Language Documentation & Conservation 15. 514–550. Williams, Nicholas, W. D. L. Silva, Laura McPherson & Jeff Good. 2021. COVID-19 and documentary linguistics: Some ways forward. Language Documentation and Description 20. 359–377.