On Wednesday last week (25th April) during Endangered Languages Week at SOAS there was a presentation on the “Dawes online” project at SOAS which aims to make an interactive digital facsimile of William Dawes’ notebooks of the Sydney language available on the web. The project has produced high resolution digital images of the notebooks written by Dawes in 1790 and is developing searchable transcriptions of the manuscripts that will include the linguistic analysis made by Jaky Troy (published in 1993) along with topic maps (using the XTM standard for XML topic maps). This will enable users to search by topic, such as “animals” or “names” as well as linguistic topics, such as verb paradigms.
This project brings together knowledge and skills from archive studies, philology, linguistic analysis, and information and multimedia technologies. It is one of the more technically sophisticated of a series of projects that have emerged over the past several years to work on archival materials of Australian and Pacific languages, especially languages that have no or very few speakers. This work has parallels in the richly elaborated studies of Old English manuscripts published by Bernard Muir of Melbourne University as CDs and DVDs. The goal of both Muir’s work and the Dawes project is to present the original materials in an interactive format along with layers of standoff analytical markup.
A related kind of study is what we could call “second generation language documentation” (2GLD) where it is linguist’s fieldnotes and transcriptions which form the basis for documentation rather than speech events or speaker knowledge (usually because it is no longer possible to access such knowledge or events). Paradisec has photographed over 10,000 pages of fieldnotes on a wide range of languages for 2GLD purposes using the system developed at the Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre This includes Arthur Capell’s notes on Pacific languages.
Archiving
FollowEternity pills and common e-research problems
All over Australia now people are writing reports on the progress of their grants – to attach to their begging-letters for more grants. Reading the reports gives you the sense that Australia is a garden of projects, each a mass of bright blossoms fragrant with success. (So why haven’t we solved world poverty or climate change yet?) That’s why it was really really good to go along to the ARC E-Research post-funding workshop (14-15 February), where participants were encouraged to report on the problems they encountered in their projects…
Two little somethings for your grant application
It’s Australian grant application time! Joy, rapture! (Skips lightly around the room) If you’re thinking about what to spend your requested squillions on, here are two thoughts: Archiving Be realistic about how much it will cost to prepare your recordings for archiving, and then the cost of archiving itself – if you don’t have a … Read more
Guest Blogger Barry Craig on the Pacific Gallery at the SA Museum
[ Barry sent this in response to the Artefacts, labels and linguists post. He is the curator responsible for the Pacific Cultures Gallery at the South Australian Museum, and has a brilliant website for an Upper Sepik-Central New Guinea project on the relations between material culture and language, geographical propinquity, population, subsistence and environment.]
The outcome of the renovation of the Pacific Gallery is a compromise between the enormous task of upgrading and relabelling an exhibition of 3000 artefacts and the available funding. A lot of money went into removing the 1960s ceiling, replacing aircon, carpet and lighting, and a paint job. I did not agree with the shiny black but the Goths had the numbers in the committee.
We have begun the difficult task of providing renewed labelling in the wall cases – difficult because one case may have around a hundred items and in such instances we can’t provide a label for each individual item – instead we will try to say something about the collectivity of objects that gives the viewer some sense of what they are looking at, in terms of types and geographical distribution (such as in the display of over 80 stone headed clubs). Electronic means of providing information will not be limited in this way and individual items will be provided with full data, including language groups (speech communities) from which the objects have come (where known).
Power, open access and language rights
Whether languages can be property has generated further discussion, on Language Log, and on several anthropology blogs (thanks Kimberly!). Two themes emerged: power, and the potential conflict with open access.
Barking up the same tree: the need for digital archives
The surprise for me from the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork workshop (aka Suzzy Data..) was how much plant taxonomists and field linguists have in common. And how much we need to work together with librarians and archivists. We both have to look after records – the decaying recordings of the languages, and the dried specimens in the herbariums. We both work with the living communities, the trees that will get logged and the communities that live with the trees, and the families and children who will switch to speaking another language.
Suzzy Data Workshop – Guest blogger Bruce Birch
Dear ELAN Workshop attendees, and anyone who might find this of interest,
There were a few loose ends left at the end of the ELAN workshop last week. I’d particularly like to address one, the question as to whether we should aim for a standard set of ELAN templates which everyone uses.
Zotero: endnote for e-research?
Last week, one of my favourite blogs, BoingBoing, had an interesting link to a new web based research tool. I’ve been having a go over the weekend.
Good things in the Language Archives Network News newsletter (No.8)
Check out the latest Language Archives Network News [sorry Dave!]newsletter here. It’s got helpful information on how the Max Planck Institute (Nijmegen) can help you set up a local archive, a system of cataloguing linguistics information (IMDI) about your recordings, and on getting permanent unique resource identifiers for stuff stored on the web. And it’s also got an article on recording information about plants and animals in the field that you might read in conjunction with Tom’s post on this topic.