admin If you ask a linguist what they collect when they do fieldwork on a language they will probably tell you that they make audio and video recordings. They then go on to annotate these in various ways, such as by adding information about pronunciation (transcription), meaning (translation) or word structure (morpheme-by-morpheme glossing) and sentence structure … Read more
There is an interesting post on the That munanga linguist blog about what he calls “slow fieldwork” where community members in the Northern Territory do their own transcriptions of recordings. He relates this to part of the process of “giving back” that has been talked about here and here and here.
As regular readers of this blog may know, Clair Bowern has been compiling a massive database of lexical materials on Australian languages in her NSF-funded project on reconstruction and language classification. She now has over 600,000 items in her database from 1,000 sources (all individually referenced and attributed, unlike some other collections: see here and … Read more
A group of SOAS students taking the MA in Language Documentation and Description this year organised a project to map the diversity of languages spoken by staff, students and visitors to SOAS, and to record language samples. They have identified scores of languages in use around SOAS and recorded 40 samples, including proverbs, poetry and … Read more
Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about some of the parameters involved in transcribing media files, and how long it takes to do various sorts of transcription, translation and annotation tasks. In the commentary on my post, the ELAN transcription software tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at … Read more
Over the past 10 years or so it has become increasingly common for researchers working on endangered languages to deposit their recordings and analysis (transcriptions, translations, annotations, dictionaries, grammars etc.) in a language archive1 In fact, in Himmelmann’s manifesto on language documentation (HImmelmann 1998, 2002, see also Himmelmann 2006) and Woodbury’s seminal articles (Woodbury 2003, … Read more
Jeff Good has written a blog post about how citation metadata was dealt with in various file conversions for the Lexicon Enhancement via the GOLD Ontology (LEGO) project. His post was written in response to my discussion and follow up (plus James McElvenny’s contribution) about citation practices of data aggregators like LEGO and PanLex. Jeff’s … Read more
Continuum International Publishing Group has just sent me a complimentary copy of Jim Miller’s new textbook A Critical Introduction to Syntax which includes a chapter on “Noun Phrases and Non-configurationality” (pages 61-98). Since this is a topic I have published on (Austin and Bresnan 1996, Austin 2001a, 2001b) I figured I’d have a quick look … Read more
In a recent blog post James McElvenny presents a broad-ranging discussion about copyright, in response to my earlier post about the use of materials from my published work without attribution by the PanLex project. James covers a lot of ground and brings in many different aspects, including his frustrations that he “can’t play region-coded DVDs … Read more
Peter Austin has raised his voice on this blog to ‘protect [his] legal rights and those of the Dieri people who have contributed to [his] knowledge of their language’ (source). He suggests that the PanLex project is guilty of ‘theft’ for using, without citation, data from a Dieri-English word list contained in his 1981 grammar … Read more
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