The DLDP 'digital language survival kit' will be an instrument allowing regional and minority languages speakers and communities to a) self assess the degree of digital fitness of their language, by pinpointing current gaps and areas where action can and needs to be taken and b) learn about what concrete actions and initiatives can be put in place depending on the particular digital fitness level identified. For instance, a minimal degree of digital fitness will require a level of “digital survival capacity'' (in increasing order of necessity): ensuring connectivity; develop and adopt a standardized encoding; develop a standardized orthography, and some basic language resources, at least a corpus, a spell checker, and a lexicon. Higher levels of digital fitness will require other types of measures, such as, for instance, creating or enriching a Wikipedia in the language, push for having localized version of important sites, main operating systems and social media interfaces. The 'kit' will serve as a companion of the training programme and will have a similar modular structure.
ELH will be responsible for planning and designing the model and structure of the 'kit'; all other partners will contribute to it in their respective expertise, and with help of external consultants when needed.
In the framework of the project, the 'kit' will be fully developed for Basque, Breton, Karelian and Sardinian; its model and structure, however, will be designed so as to be applicable to as many languages as possible, thus ensuring circulation and adoption beyond the languages investigated in the project and after the project’s lifetime.
The activities related to this output will take place between M13 and M34, and they can be summarized as follows:
A3.1 - identification of levels of "digital survival capacity", taking into account the set of dimensions, axes, and features used for empirically and statistically quantifying the results of the survey (M13-16);
A3.2 - design of a "digital fitness scoring mechanism" for measuring and comparing the “digital fitness” of Europe’s languages, to be made available on the project web site (M17-34);
A3.3 - identification of measures for increasing digital survival capacity, to be coupled with identified levels (M17-27);
A3.4 - preparation of the language reports (in English) for the languages investigated (M27-31);
A3.5 - preparation of the report explaining the "digital fitness scoring mechanism" (M30-33);
A3.6 - translation of the document in the following language pairs: Spanish + Basque, French + Breton, Finnish + Karelian, Italian + Sardinian (M32-34).
The intended addressees of the 'digital language survival kit' are – primarily – regional and minority languages speakers and associations so that they will be able to implement appropriate actions for raising the digital survival capacity of their language, at the individual or collective level.
Additionally, we believe that the 'kit' will help the community of digital content players and technology developers to concentrate on the really pressing issues, thereby securing the “digital well-being” of as many European languages as possible (more concerted efforts, less fragmentation, less duplication of efforts, less resources invested in the wrong topics etc.).
We also expect that regional and minority languages speakers and communities using the 'kit' will return their feedback under the form of data related to the various languages to which it will have been applied. These data will be curated and maintained on the DLDP digital fitness monitor database.