Myaamia Center and Miami University’s IT Services Receive 2023 CIO 100 Award for Contributions to National Breath of Life Technology

We’re pleased to share that the Myaamia Center, the institutional home of National Breath of Life, with support from Miami University’s IT Services, has received a national CIO 100 Award for its innovative use of technology to deliver the National Breath of Life: Capacity Building for Community Language Archivists Apprenticeship Program. 

The National CIO 100 Awards celebrates 100 organizations and the teams within them using IT in innovative ways, either by creating competitive advantage, optimizing organizational processes, enabling growth, or improving relationships with customers. 

While the CIO 100 Awards focus on business technology, National Breath of Life (BoL) is being recognized for its innovations in language revitalization. Therefore, National BoL is a unique recipient of this award as a non-profit program. 

National BoL offers stages of training to support participant communities in building their language archives and incorporating that knowledge into community programming at their own pace. Web-based and software technology have been useful tools for this training since the creation of the organization. 

At the center of this work is the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) software suite.  The development of the ILDA software suite is a primary way that National BoL supports communities engaged in archives-based language revitalization work. Most recently, this technology has been applied to the Community Language Archivists Apprenticeship Program, to train apprentices in archives development while building capacity within their own communities.

The growing number of communities engaging in archives-based language revitalization continues to shape development, new approaches, and a growing platform of tools to support their unique needs. National BoL training programs utilize creative solutions to directly respond to the needs of those who are responsible for building and maintaining community-curated language archives.

Beginning in 2012 with a vision and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ILDA was initially designed by community language teachers and tribal linguists to support the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma‘s archives-based language revitalization work. After years of testing and refinement, the Myaamia team created a platform uniquely suited to support archives-based efforts. 

Beginning in 2019, the Myaamia Center, with support from the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, began beta testing ILDA with other languages that had significantly different grammatical structures, to test its viability for general use in language revitalization contexts. The long-term goal was to improve the software to support other languages and then offer ILDA as part of the new National BoL training model

Dirk Tepe, director of Application Architecture and Operations at Miami University, assisted in further developing ILDA by utilizing practices already established by Miami University’s IT Services to support the software.

The software development team is composed of master’s students from the Miami University College of Engineering and Computing, who work as graduate assistants in the Myaamia Center under the supervision of Dr. Doug Troy, coordinator of Application Development at the Myaamia Center. The outcome was a new and improved version of ILDA that could be more easily shared and maintained using industry standards.

Today, ILDA is being disseminated to tribes across the country to support their work. National BoL is proud to be sharing this tool with other communities through our organization and training programs.

In 2021, National BoL, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, pursued continued software development and the launch of the Community Language Archivists Apprenticeship Program to support archival development and capacity building to participating tribal communities. The development team has also been working under these grants to update the National BoL website to include distance learning tools and resources to support apprenticeship and other NBoL participants.  

The development team responsible for developing and maintaining this innovative technology, including the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive software suite includes: 

Dr. Doug Troy, coordinator of Application Development, Myaamia Center 

Jerome Viles, National Breath of Life Archives Development Trainor 

Dirk Tepe, Director of Application Architecture and Operations, Miami University IT Services 

Myaamia Center graduate student developers: 

• Xianli Sun
• Amlaan Shakeel
• Alex Stahl
• Chris Anderson
• Zachary Haitz
• Chitraketu Panda
• Shova Thapa
• Sampada Bhujel
• Bishal Baaniya
• Aaoyg Koirala

ILDA is copyrighted and managed by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma through the Myaamia Center at Miami University. The Miami Tribe understands the need for communities to maintain control of their archival contents and data derived from working with language archives. In order to ensure this, the Miami Tribe has preserved important data sovereignty protocols in the ILDA user license and privacy policy. 

The long-term stability and ongoing maintenance of ILDA are maintained within the context of the Miami Tribe’s own language revitalization efforts, now 30 years old, and within the supporting 50-year relationship between the Miami Tribe and Miami University.

National Breath of Life is committed to supporting communities that rely on archival materials to drive their language revitalization efforts. We look forward to receiving this award at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards in August.