Mission
What Tierline is for
To reduce the time it takes to find what is said, and how, in archival Indigenous-language recordings, while access, use, publication and stewardship stay with the communities responsible for them.
Vision
Making recordings usable
Archival language materials should be usable, as well as preserved, by the communities connected to them, and using modern computational tools should not require those communities to give up control of culturally significant recordings.
Our role
Who decides what
Communities determine priorities, protocol, access, cultural authority, publication, and whether a project should continue at all.
The software is built around that division and enforces it: the policy engine on the governance page is what it looks like in code. Where a technical decision and a community decision conflict, the technical decision changes.
In practice
Three commitments
Finding material in long recordings
Preservation alone does not make a long recording easy to use. Tierline focuses on the practical work of locating relevant material inside large audio collections.
People interpret the results
Tierline retrieves likely matches; it does not decide what a recording means. Language workers, teachers, speakers and elders remain the interpreters.
Processing where the steward decides
Culturally sensitive recordings should not have to reach a commercial cloud service to benefit from computation. Tierline’s reference engine is built to run on the steward’s own computer, under an explicit access policy, and exports to open formats such as ELAN and Praat. The community pilots are hosted under their own agreements: three privately hosted or local-first, one operated remotely with its institution’s approval.
Why recordings
What a recording keeps that a transcript does not
Pronunciation, rhythm and intonation, the way a speaker tells a story, and the voice itself. For a language program, a decades-old tape can be one of the few records of how a word was said. Tierline helps the people responsible for such recordings find those moments again, under their own rules.
The language work belongs to speakers, elders, teachers, archivists and language programs. Tierline is a tool for that work, under their direction.
Collections
How a community might organize its collections
Collections are each community’s decision. These four are examples; a program may use different categories, or decide that some material does not belong in a digital archive.
Language
Pronunciation, rhythm and phrasing: how a word sounds, as well as how it is spelled.
Try organizing recordings in the Workspace ↗02Stories
Oral histories and memories, with the context the teller chooses to attach.
Try organizing recordings in the Workspace ↗03Teachings
Advice and teachings, shared only where the community permits.
Try organizing recordings in the Workspace ↗04Land and place
Place names and knowledge of the land, under community-defined access.
Try organizing recordings in the Workspace ↗Some knowledge is restricted by season, role, initiation, kinship or place, and some should not be recorded at all. The community sets those boundaries, and Tierline’s permissions express them: nothing has to be digitized, searchable, exported or used to train a model.
A community-led workflow
Results stay attached to their source
A workflow for a community-led archive, in which each step is a person’s decision.