Many a Little Makes a Mickle – Infrastructure Component Reuse for a Massively Multilingual Linguistic Study

We present ongoing work aiming at turning the linguistic material available in Griersons classical Linguis-tic Survey of India (LSI) into a digital language resource, a database suitable for a broad array of linguistic investigations of the languages of South Asia and studies relating language typology and contact linguis-tics. The project has two main aims: (1) to conduct a linguistic investigation of the claim that South Asia constitutes a linguistic area; (2) to develop state-of-the-art language technology for automatically extract-ing the relevant information from the text of the LSI. In this presentation we focus on how a number of existing research infrastructure components were ‘recycled’ in order to allow the linguists involved in the project to quickly orient themselves in the vast LSI material, and to be able to provide input to the language technologists designing the information extraction from the descriptive grammars