Soon, Deb and I head to Mérida for three weeks. There’s a couple tasks we hope to accomplish.
First, we need to hire a native Yucatec speaker to record audio for the Ancient Maya App. Our Ancient Maya App includes details on Yaxchilan Stela 11 in English, Spanish and K’iche. It’s great to watch glyphs highlights while the are read by a native K’iche speaker from Guatemala. But, there’s lots of Mayan spoken in today’s world and we want to include more of it in the app. The script for Yaxchilan Stela 11 is a mix of ancient and modern Mayan words. Recording a K’iche required a couple hours. I expect we’ll need two hours to tweak the existing script and record it in Yucatec.
Second, we want to learn about how Mayan language is taught in Merida. Before covid Merida had three Maya language and culture schools. It looks like at least one is still operating. We want to see what materials are used and what topics covered. Are there features we could add to our app to make it more useful?
Third, we want to better understand guides at ancient Mayan sites. They perform informal education every day. What topics do they focus on? What ideas are difficult to convey? What is the most prominent writing at their sites? Would it be useful to record a native Mayan speaker reading it so visitors to the site could hear it? Are there features we could add to our app to.make it useful?
Fourth, can we collaborate with new friends in Mérida for ongoing projects? We have some ideas for cloud based tools for metadata editing. For example, if we can identify a prominent stela at a site perhaps local guides or teachers in Maya schools can enter metadata for each glyph in a Google spreadsheet. This metadata along with a drawing of the stela and an audio file could be ingested directly into the Ancient Maya App. The app could play the audio file and highlight glyph blocks as they were read. The cloud tools could also support the addition of new glyphs. This could be useful for city emblem glyphs. Again, we would export the spreadsheet to a file and ingest it into the app.
Doesn’t this sound exciting? We certainly think so! We’ll post a lot once we get down there.