Dr Laura Welcher

Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project at the Long Now Project, Laura Welcher is a linguist with research interests in endangered language documentation, description and revitalization, as well as the growing subdiscipline of computer-assisted linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she learned first hand the importance of creating digital language resources that last in her field research on Potawatomi (a critically endangered North American language) and in her work as an archivist with the Survey for California and Other Indian Languages. She worked with the E-MELD project in developing FIELD, an ontology-based lexical database, and building Potawatomi resources for the School of Best Practice. Since then she has become involved with various projects in linguistics that are working towards developing standards for the creation and archiving of digital language resources and interoperable tools to support linguistic research, including the Open Language Archives Community, LINGUIST List, and the GOLD Markup Ontology.