Digital Humanities – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Grammars from archival records

23 April 202322 April 2023 by Nick Thieberger

Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language. … Read more

Upcoming lecture: Payi Linda Ford – New ways for old ceremonies

19 April 2016 by Amanda Harris

Payi Linda Ford will deliver the Alfred Hook Lecture at 5pm on Wednesday 11 May 2016 at the Charles Perkins Centre Lecture Theatre, Building D17, Johns Hopkins Drive (off Missenden Road), The University of Sydney NSW 2006

Reading HyperCard stacks in 2016

4 November 202120 February 2016 by Nick Thieberger

HyperCard (HC) was a brilliant program that came free with every Macintosh computer from 1987 and was in development until around 2004. It made it possible to create multimedia ‘stacks’ (of cards) and was very popular with linguists. For example, Peter Ladefoged produced an IPA HyperCard stack and SIL had a stacks for drawing syntactic trees or for exploring the history of Indo-European (see their listing here). Texas and FreeText created by Mark Zimmerman allowed you to create quick indexes of very large text files (maybe even into the megabytes! Remember this is the early 1990s). I used FreeText when I wrote Audiamus, a corpus exploration tool that let me link text and media and then cite the text/media in my research.

My favourite HC linguistic application was J.Randolph Valentine’s Rook that presented a speaker telling an Ojibwe story (with audio), with interlinear text linked to a grammar sketch of the language. I adapted that model for a story in Warnman, told by Waka Taylor, and produced as part of a set of HC stacks called ‘Australia’s languages’ and released in 1994.

David Nathan on EL Publishing’s first month, about Open Access, and being Open about Access

13 December 20149 September 2014 by Jane Simpson

David Nathan writes

EL Publishing is a new online publisher which was launched on 18th July and which will publish a journal, multimedia, and monographs, focussing on documentation and description of endangered languages. EL Publishing has an international editorial board and operates a fully double-blind peer-review process for all submitted materials.

Playing texts and media—EOPAS again

19 July 2014 by Nick Thieberger

While I obviously like EOPAS as a model for corpus presentation (see the earlier blog post about it here), I found a renewed enthusiasm for it today as I was checking the meaning of a word in a text I was translating from South Efate. The word lunak does not appear in any of my notes nor in the dictionary, but appears a few times in a story told by the late Kalsarap Namaf. I wrote to Joel Kalpram, who is from Erakor village and speaks the language, and asked him if he knew the word.

Open access and intimate fieldwork

15 March 201414 March 2014 by rsinger

A report on the Linguistics in the Pub discussion Tuesday 11^th March, Prince Alfred Hotel, Grattan St, Melbourne.

This Linguistics in the Pub discussion brought together fieldworkers who do research in Indigenous Australia, Africa, South Asia, Papua New Guinea and Nepal, as well as a computational linguist who has developed software to automate language documentation. The linguists were not all Australian, in fact we were lucky to have four participants who identify as European who are living in Australia, temporarily or permanently. The linguists’ experience in language documentation ranged from between 6-30 years and between them had deposited in the digital archives: DoBeS, Paradisec and ELAR. The timeliness of this discussion is demonstrated by David Nathan’s very recent ELAC post on the same topic.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

20 December 2013 by Nick Thieberger

We have great pleasure in announcing that the ARC has funded a Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language over seven years. This project will be led by Nick Evans at ANU with a collaborative team from there, the University of Western Sydney, the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne, and with many partners from other universities and institutions including AIATSIS and Appen.

We want this to be a centre for collaboration, for generating ideas and inspiration for linguistics in Australia and the world. In the New Year we’ll be putting up a web-page to give more information, In the meantime, here’s an overview of what we are planning.

Useful and interesting websites and apps about endangered languages: July LIP

11 July 2013 by rsinger

Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of this week’s Melbourne Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne In this month’s LIP and last month’s participants shared in their latest discoveries in the world of apps and online resources. June’s meeting focused on software … Read more

Supporting language use and learning

25 May 2013 by Jane Simpson

In the midst of Endangered Languages Week there is the good and the bad. The good was the delight of reading Rob Munro’s post on what his company Idibon intends to do for NLP for endangered languages. The company is advised by Chris Manning, and I learned today that his wonderful Warlpiri dictionary presentation tool … Read more

Digitising Mali’s cultural heritage — Simon Tanner

29 January 2013 by Nick Thieberger

Simon Tanner has a blog post on his experience of working with various manuscript collections and the tragic destruction of potentially thousands of manuscripts from the New Ahmed Baba Institute building in Mali: “I have worked with manuscripts for over 20 years now; as a librarian, academic and as a consultant helping others to digitise … Read more