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.
Nick Thieberger
FollowCharting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures
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
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
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
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
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?
Sustainable data from digital research – presentations available
In December 2011 PARADISEC hosted a conference titled ‘Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship’. Presentations from that conference are now available as audio or video downloads from the following repository: http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/7890. Ten of these presentations also include a peer-reviewed chapter in the conference proceedings.
See below for an RSS feed of all titles and links in the The University of Sydney eScholarship Repository
The Bhasha Vasudha: Global Languages Meet. A report by RNLD’s Margaret Florey
The Bhasha Vasudha: Global Languages Meet was held over several venues in Gujarat, India from 7-8 January 2012. The Meet was the creation of language activist Dr Ganesh Devy of the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre, who in 2011 was awarded the International Linguapax Award in recognition of “a lifetime dedicated to the promotion, dignification and preservation of a multitude of languages in India”.
The Meet commenced at the Sir Sayajirao Auditorium in Vadodara with the release of the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI).
PARADISEC’s 2011
This year at PARADISEC our collections grew as follows:
January 2011 / December 2011
159/172 collections
6,972 /7,422 items
46,900 /58,680 files
5.02 /5.46 TB
2880:25/3185:43 hours
We are always in negotiation with prospective depositors about collections, for example, we are working with Theodore Schwartz to accession his wonderful 1950s Manus (PNG) recordings (made with Margaret Mead) and have accessioned John Harris’s PNG recordings from the 1960s. Not all negotiations are successful however. For example, we offered to work with the Basel Kultur Museum to digitise Fr. John Z’graggen’s 500 tapes from the Madang region of PNG, but so far that offer has not been taken up.
We continue to be an exemplary five-star Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) collection, which means our metadata is among the few OLAC archives with the highest quality rating. The content of the metadata relies on depositors, so we have focused on making it as easy as possible for a minimal metadata set to be entered and then enhanced over time. Our metadata is also harvested at the collection-level by the Australian National Data Service.
Languages in the News (from RNLD’s Felicity Houwen)
After the recent LIP discussion about languages in the popular media we decided to take a look at the way indigenous and endangered languages are represented in the press. Looking through the articles listed on the Languages in the News page on RNLD’s website (www.rnld.org/news) we focused on how Indigenous languages are represented, and what kind of themes, languages, and locations gain media attention. This will be useful in planning how we can better use the media in the future. Here is an overview of the Languages in the News 2011.