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Free and open

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In commenting on a recent blog post of mine about SOAS publication plans, Nick Thieberger raises a number of relevant and important issues for anyone publishing in our field. Getting comments like this is manna to me as a blog author since so many of my posts go uncommented upon (I know people are reading them because I can track redirects from Facebook and my home page via bitly.com, and just occasionally someone references the content of a blog post, as in the recently published Handbook of Descriptive Linguistic Fieldwork by Shobhana L. Chelliah and William J. De Reuse). It is also good to be challenged to clarify one’s own thinking about issues, so thanks for the feedback, Nick.
I identified the following main four points in Nick’s comments:

  • 1. LDD should “move to an Open Access model for [its] content in the future”
  • 2. content should be free and online because that makes it available to people who cannot pay and who would otherwise not be able to access it
  • 3. having content online means you can measure downloads and the number of downloads measures impact
  • 4. the current LDD business model should be replaced

I will respond to each of these points in turn.

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Good on you LTU!

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I have a soft spot for La Trobe University (LTU) in Australia. LTU is where I got my first tenured job 30 years ago (just over two years after finishing my PhD — ah, those were the days) and still the place I have worked the longest in a somewhat peripatetic academic career (summarised here. … Read more

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SOAS publication plans

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This month the eighth volume of Language Documentation and Description (LDD8) hit the streets (you can order it at a 25% discount, and also get 25% off any of our other volumes ordered before 31 December 2010). It’s a special issue on documentation of endangered oral literatures and is guest edited by Imogen Gunn and … Read more

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No more Ngarla

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Friday this week (5th November 2010) marks a sad day for Aboriginal languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia with the funeral of Alexander (“Sandy”) Brown, the last fluent speaker of Ngarla. Sandy was born in 1930 near the De Grey River in the traditional country of the Ngarla which stretched eastwards for about … Read more

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Alive & Digital event in New York

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The Trace Foundation is a New York based non-profit non-government organisation that has been working with Tibetan communities in China since 1993, mainly on education, health, rural development, and culture. The Foundation offers grants in these areas, and hosts the Latse Library of Tibetan materials at its home base in Greenwich Village in New York City.
Over the past two years Trace Foundation has organised various events, both exhibitions and lecture series on a range of topics, including minority and endangered languages, especially Tibetan. The series has included the following language-related symposia:

  • Minority Language in Today’s Global Society — 22 November 2008
  • Perspectives in Mother Tongue Education — 21-22 February 2009
  • Vitality and Viability of Minority Languages — 23-24 October 2009
  • Perspectives on Language Standardization — 27 March 2010
  • The Relationship between Language, Culture, and Ecology — 24-25 September 2010

On 20-21 November 2010 the sixth and final symposium called Alive & Digital will be held, bringing together scholars and experts who have worked extensively on minority language preservation and new technologies. The main topics to be discussed are what technological breakthroughs lie ahead and how technology today is impacting linguistic minorities worldwide. The first day will involve a diverse group of speakers discussing past and present trends in the relationship between technology and language, and the second day will explore technological issues specific to the Tibetan language including the Tibetan font converter, Unicode, and iPhone applications.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

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The play’s the thing

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Back in 2003 David Crystal published a paper entitled “Endangered Languages: what should we do now”, in the first volume of Language Documentation and Description in which he suggested that it was time that the Arts got interested in endangered languages and he wondered when we would be seeing TV programmes, novels, plays, paintings, symphonies, … Read more

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Psst, want some data?

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Last month I wrote a blog post about quantification in language documentation and “[h]ow much of the corpus needs to be linguistically annotated so that ‘later researchers will be able to reconstruct the (grammar of the) language’ or indeed so that the rest of the corpus can be parsed”. Note that I was talking about linguistic annotation (not just transcription) here, but in his very useful comments on my post, James Crippen wrote:

“Some folks I know have well over 1000 hours of recorded material, and I think nowhere near ten percent of that has been transcribed. Asking for someone to do the ten percent for this before being willing to accept it is a bit unreasonable.”

Well, the first thing I have to say is: 1000 hours is an awful lot of recordings. It’s about 7.5 times the average DoBeS corpus (based on the figure I mentioned in my previous post) and if it’s video it’s equivalent to around 550 feature length movies (which average around 110 minutes each). If you spent every waking hour of the working week, with no time for eating, bathing, shopping, checking e-mail etc, it would take you six and a half months to merely watch or listen to it all, let alone create any metadata, analysis, transcription, or index (and remember that this is probably going to be in a language you don’t understand and with no subtitles). You’d want to have a good reason to do so, I reckon.
Anyway, be that as it may, James’ comment prompted me to seek some empirical data about this issue, so I wrote to five colleagues who are responsible for archives of materials on endangered languages, namely Peter Wittenburg of the DoBeS archive, Heidi Johnson of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America AILLA, Gary Holton of the Alaska Native Language Archive ANLA, Nick Thieberger of the Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures PARADISEC, and David Nathan of the Endangered Languages Archive ELAR at SOAS. I asked them the following questions:

“If someone approached you about depositing 1000 hours of recorded digital data on some language, less than 10% of which was transcribed, what advice would you (Archive_Name) give them? What would be the minimal requirements that you would have in order to accept the materials for deposit?”

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Where does the dosh go?

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About 18 months ago I wrote a blog post about potential sources of funding for endangered languages research. I identified three main types of funders: governmental grant bodies, non-governmental grant bodies, and endangered languages grant bodies. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), which is a sister to the Academic Programme (ELAP) and the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS, is one of the largest in the last category, distributing around GBP 1million per year in competitive grants.
As part of my current interest in meta-documentation, that is the documentation of language documentation (see this recent conference abstract, and a differently focussed workshop abstract [.pdf]), I have been looking at how granting agencies, and ELDP in particular, spend their funds. Where is funded research being carried out and where is the money being allocated to? Are there any changes over time that can be observed?
I chose to look at ELDP because it has global coverage in terms of the research areas it is interested in and in terms of which researchers it is prepared to fund. It also publishes information about the grantees and the size of the grants awarded, so data collection is easy. Volkswagen Foundation, in contrast, requires a German component in their DoBeS projects, while NSF-NEH Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) grants are restricted to US Institutions.
I wish to make it clear that although ELDP is administered by SOAS staff, its grant decision making processes are entirely independent of SOAS and are carried out by an International Panel chaired by Andrew Spencer of the University of Essex. The opinions I am expressing here are also independent of ELDP itself.

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It’s only natural

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During a recent vacation I took the opportunity to re-read Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent collection of essays The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History” (published by Viking in 2001, the year before Gould’s untimely death). In his essay “A Tale of Two Work Sites” Gould reminds us (page 257) that it was … Read more

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