A two-day conference titled ‘Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures’ ran on June 29/30 in Cambridge, UK. Organised by the World Oral Literature Project, the conference brought together a range of ‘scholars, digital archivists and international organisations to share experiences of mapping ethno-linguistic diversity using interactive digital technologies.’
A discussion of the conference at the Arctic Anthropology blog gives a good overview, so, rather than duplicate what you can read there, I’ll just add some useful pointers to things I discovered at the conference:
– I didn’t know that the data under the UNESCO atlas of endangered languages can be downloaded freely.
– There can be a model of user-pays for information that adds value to open source material and is commercially viable (Alexander Street Press).
– There are students at SOAS who have produced a great website of geocoded language information.
– The Glottolog/langdoc project has 175,000 references linked to what 94,000 what they call ‘languoids’ (languages, dialects, families).
– There is a great project at the CNRS for making media available online (http://telemeta.org/) and for annotating it. They also use the Vamp plugin that looks interesting as a way of analysing and extracting information from audio files.
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