The inaugural issue (Volume 1, Number 1) of Language Documentation & Conservation (LD&C) is now available at http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/.
LD&C is a free, fully refereed, open-access, online journal that is published twice a year, in June and December. Please visit the LD&C webpage and subscribe (free), because that will help the journal editors show to their paymistresses/masters that we need and value the journal.
The Table of Contents lists 6 articles, 3 technology reviews and 2 book reviews. Among the articles is one for addicts of Tom Honeyman’s posts on Solar power (parts 1, 2 and 3 – a paper “Solar Power for the Digital Fieldworker” by Tom together with Laura Robinson. The technology reviews include one by Felicity Meakins, who works on the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project that I’m involved in, on the transcription program CLAN that we’ve been using. The book reviews include a detailed review by Robert Early of PARADISEC’s manager Nick Thieberger’s recent grammar of South Efate (Vanuatu). Early highlights the important documentation innovation in Nick’s book.
This grammar will always be noted for one distinctive advance over its predecessors,
in that […], the traditional print grammar is accompanied by a DVD containing digitized audio and visual materials that can be readily accessed with any web browser. Producing this was genuinely innovative work, requiring the development of cutting-edge technical and computational mechanisms. T. is applauded for not only modeling this new paradigm in linguistic description and language documentation, but also for his subsequent ongoing efforts to refine the technical tools involved and to encourage more widespread adoption of digital documentation in language recording, description, and archiving. This grammar + DVD combo will make it difficult for future Oceanicists [JHS note: any descriptive linguist] to step back from the challenge of producing “a well-described broad range of language usage data that is securely archived,” and of achieving a better balance between ‘description’ and ‘documentation’.
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