Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Language Documentation

This special edition of the Language Documentation & Conservation Journal results from a speakers' series held at the Third International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation in 2013. The speakers' series was designed to bring attention to the complexities and value of interdisciplinary research in language documentation. Four speakers shared their ongoing research and have since revised their talks into the papers presented herein. Each paper offers a slightly different approach to designing and implementing interdisciplinary research in the context of language documentation and each involves a different combination of disciplines. The authors present some aspect of what constitutes and defines interdisciplinary research, an approach that has been a frequent topic of academic rhetoric but remains on the fringes of mainstream research agendas. Before discussing the papers directly, some discussion of what constitutes 'interdisciplinary research' is in order.