Experience – Page 3 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Workshop on non-linguistic aspects of fieldwork – Sheena Van Der Mark

5 February 20112 April 2009 by Jane Simpson

[from Sheena Van Der Mark, La Trobe University] A workshop about bringing non-linguistic aspects of fieldwork out of lunchtime conversations and into a more public domain is being proposed for the upcoming Australian Linguistics Society Conference at La Trobe University. This is the abstract for the workshop as it currently stands: The experiences we have … Read more

ELAP students fieldtrip

5 February 20111 April 2009 by admin

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme at SOAS is experimenting this year with including hands-on in situ fieldwork as part of our MA in Language Documentation and Description.

A group of MA students is currently carrying out two weeks of fieldwork in Guernsey with Dr Julia Sallabank, Research Fellow in Language Support and Revitalisation, who has been doing research on Dgèrnésiais (the locally preferred spelling, more commonly spelled Guernésiais) for many years. The students are documenting contemporary language use and making digital audio and video recordings of narrative and conversations, putting into practice the knowledge and skills they have been acquiring in their MA coursework, especially the half-units Field Methods and Technology and Language Documentation. Dgèrnésiais is the nearest autochthonous endangered language to SOAS and is estimated by Jan Marquis, the Guernsey Language Support Officer, to have around 1,000 speakers (just 2% of the population), with the bulk of them aged over 60. The trip is timed to coincide with the annual Guernsey Eisteddfod which includes poetry and speaking competitions.

To be or not to be a field linguist? Amy Cruickshanks

5 February 201128 June 2007 by Jane Simpson

Thoughts from a student after surviving our Field Methods course.
The decision to take this unit of study came easily to me. Having had Field Methods recommended by fellow linguistic-loving students as one of the best linguistics classes EVER!!!! I was pretty much sold even before I knew the class was on offer. And as prior to this class the only world of linguistics I knew was a theoretical one with data being presented on a nice little platter for me to pick up and analyse with no thoughts or concerns as to how the data actually made its way to me in the first place, I thought it might make a nice change for me to personally go through the elicitation process. Plus, this way I didn’t actually need to deal with the sand and dirt that generally goes hand in hand with field work, as I could get some experience in the field right here in our beloved intransient Transient Building.

On Patois

5 February 20116 April 2007 by admin

I spent last week in Lyon working on plans for collaborative teaching and research with Colette Grinevald and her colleagues at Lyon-2 University and the CNRS DDL research laboratory. This will include a summer school on language documentation planned for June-July 2008 (we will announce more details soon), joint workshops and conferences, and development of a European Masters programme.
On Saturday (31st March) Michel Bert, who also teaches at Lyon-2 and is a researcher in the CNRS ICAR research laboratory, invited Colette and me to accompany him south from Lyon along the Rhône River to visit the field sites where he has been collecting data on the Franco-Provençal language over the past 10 years. Michel’s PhD dissertation is a detailed study of this language based on data he collected from over 150 consultants.

Power, open access and language rights

5 February 201121 December 2006 by Jane Simpson

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.

Blog catcher: Africa, America, Australia, art, language, literacy, software, travel

5 February 201127 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Sociolingo’s Africa is a general blog which includes posts about languages (the writer’s based in Mali but draws together material from across Africa). There are some interesting posts on linguistics, literacy – including mother tongue language education. So much seems so familiar. Thanks to this blog I’ve learned about Litcam, Google, and UNESCO’s Institute for … Read more

Recording naturalistic conversation just got even easier

5 February 20115 October 2006 by admin

Here is a technological update to my previous posting on recording conversation.
I consider myself very privileged to be able to visit the Department of Linguistics at UCSB, where I have been lucky enough to audit a number of courses, including Jack Du Bois‘ course on discourse transcription. Today we were introduced to a very nice piece of equipment, the Edirol R-09 ultra-portable flash ram recorder. This piece of equipment is about the same dimensions as an i-pod, although a bit fatter.

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

HCSNet Summer School 2006

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Registration for the Human Communication Sciences Network SummerFest06 (Nov 27th – Dec 1st) opens today. There looks to be an interesting line up of courses. I’m hoping I can head along to the courses on Bayesian Networks and Markov Models and Statistics for Linguistics amongst others. I heard that Trevor Johnston’s course on sign languages … Read more

‘How about a cuppa tea?’ On techniques for recording naturalistic conversation.

5 February 201125 September 2006 by admin

This posting is topically aligned with two excellent postings (one by Tom on this blog and one by Claire at Anggarrgoon) about problems relating to video recording and the observer’s paradox. In my comments to Tom’s posting, I talked about some of the problems I’d had recording naturalistic conversation on video and that I’d had more success with straight audio. So I’ll now talk about the audio recording of conversation, which is where I have had more success.