Nick Thieberger

PhD Top-up scholarship in Linguistics within cross-corpus DoBeS project on three-participant events

12 October 201211 October 2012 by Nick Thieberger

Posted by Anna Margetts

The project Cross-linguistic patterns in the encoding of three-participant events will start in 2013 as a cross-corpus project of the Documentation of Endangered Languages Program (DoBeS) of the Volkswagen Foundation (http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/); chief investigator: Anna Margetts (Monash University), co-applicants: Nikolaus Himmelmann (University of Cologne) and Katharina Haude (CNRS, Paris).

Faculty/School: Faculty of Arts, School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics
Location: Clayton Campus, Melbourne
Scholarship tenure: 3 years full time, beginning in 2013
Scholarship value: $6,750 per annum (conditions apply)
Laptop & standard software up to a value of $1700
Closing Date: 31 October 2012

Project summary: The project investigates the linguistic encoding of events which involve three participants. It brings together three areas of study: the encoding of three-participant events, the typological parameter of basic valence orientation, and the field of text-based typology. (For more details see the project description further below).

PARADISEC’s ‘Data Seal of Approval’

19 September 201219 September 2012 by Nick Thieberger

As we approach our tenth year of operation, it is gratifying that PARADISEC has achieved this seal of approval (DSA), based on 16 criteria (listed below, and see how we meet these criteria here: https://assessment.datasealofapproval.org/assessment_75/seal/html/). We have been a five-star Open Language Archives Community repository for some time, which also means that we are one of the 1800 archives whose catalog and metadata conform to the Open Archives Initiative standards, but the DSA looks more broadly at the whole process of the repository, from accession of records, through their description and curation and to disaster management. This is important for our depositors to know as they can be sure that their research output is properly described and curated, and can be found using various search tools, including google, but more specifically the Australian National Data Service, OLAC and the WorldCat, and also the aggregated information served in the Virtual Language Observatory.

Distinguishing language documentation and language description, revisited: LIP discussion

22 August 2012 by Nick Thieberger

The distinction between language documentation and language description: a LIP discussion, Ruth Singer recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

Last Monday’s debate about the distinction between language documentation and language description inspired by a recent article on the topic by Nikolaus Himmelmann in Language documentation & Conservation:
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2012. Linguistic Data Types and the Interface between Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation & Conservation 6. 187-207

The discussion was led by Rachel Nordlinger and Nick Thieberger from the University of Melbourne. Also commenting on the debate was Eva Schultze-Berndt, visiting Melbourne Uni from the University of Manchester, via Kununurra and Cairns.

Kim Scott and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project

22 March 201726 July 2012 by Nick Thieberger

Kim Scott gave a talk in Melbourne last night titled “Language & Nation”. (you can see a video of the talk here). His writing has won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Western Australian Premier’s Book Award among other honours. Last night he described the way in which his work has been intertwined with a rediscovery of the rythms and meanings of his ancestral language, Nyungar, from Albany in Western Australia. He works with the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project to, as he put it, ‘creep up on an endangered language’ through community meetings, creating artwork, and visits to country.

More new tools and methods

19 July 2012 by Nick Thieberger

I’ve been attending the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Digital Humanities (DH) workshops and conference in Hamburg (which has 510 registrants) and have learned about a number of new tools and methods for working with text, images, and media, often with large collections of primary sources that can only be analysed computationally. On the way here I called in at the MPI in Nijmegen and heard a presentation (pdf is here) by Peter Withers about the new tool they have produced called KinOath (http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/tools/kinoath), software for mapping kinship relations.

Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

4 July 2012 by Nick Thieberger

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 … Read more

Hunting the collectors

22 May 2012 by Nick Thieberger

A major motivation for PARADISEC has been locating and digitising analog recordings before they are lost. As can be seen from various posts to this blog reporting on the progress of the collection (for 2006, for 2007, for 2008, and for 2011) we have steadily accessioned collections that would otherwise have become unplayable. We have … Read more

Discussion about Social Variation and Language Documentation: LIP Discussion

1 May 2012 by Nick Thieberger

Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of the last week’s Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne

The announcement for this month’s Linguistics in the Pub outlined the topic as follows:
The aim of language documentation, broadly speaking is to document linguistic diversity. At one level the diversity refers to the range of languages and dialects that are used. But zooming in a bit closer diversity can be understood to refer to the variation in how language is used across different speakers and contexts, i.e. social variation. Despite the close link between linguistic diversity and social variation, variation is often viewed mainly as a problem in initial stages of documenting and describing a language. It is more challenging to describe a system of phonology, grammar or morphology when it varies widely, than to describe a system with little variation. For this reason, it is often only after documenting one variety that linguists usually try to document broader socialvariation and patterns of language use. In this session, we will look at some good examples of documentation of linguistic variation and discuss how we might include some aspects of social variation in language documentation projects right from the start.

Registration: Digital Humanities Australasia 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting

21 March 2012 by Nick Thieberger

PARADISEC has organised a panel at this conference on ‘Fieldwork in the digital humanities’

DIGITAL HUMANITIES AUSTRALASIA 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting

Venue: Shine Dome, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra ACT and Sir Roland Wilson Building #120, Australian National University.

The inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 28-30 March 2012.

The conference will feature papers, panels, posters and associated workshops, including presentations on digital humanities in Australia, New Zealand and internationally showcasing new research and developments in the field and/or responding to the conference theme of ‘Building, Mapping, Connecting’. Draft program at http://aa-dh.org/conference/program/.

Retrofitting a collection? I’d rather not

25 March 201212 March 2012 by Nick Thieberger

I just had a visit from a student wanting to deposit a collection of recordings made in the course of PhD fieldwork in the PARADISEC archive. It is a great shame that they are only just now thinking about how to deposit this material, as it will need considerable work to make it archivable. If they had sought advice before doing all of the research (or looked at the PARADISEC page ‘Depositing with PARADISEC’, or looked at the RNLD pages, e.g, http://www.rnld.org/node/40) it would have been so much easier for all of us. Why?