Fieldwork – Page 8 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Wunderkammer in Canberra

5 February 20112 September 2009 by admin

Dearest Canberrans, I’ll be giving a presentation of the Wunderkammer mobile phone dictionary software at the ANU in Canberra at 11 am on 18 September. If you’re interested and in the area, come by. Full details, including the exact location, can be found here.

New ELAR publications

5 February 201125 August 2009 by admin

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), based at SOAS, has recently published two new articles on the Endangered Languages Project website that may be of interest to readers of this blog: Bernard Howard’s detailed review of the new Zoom H4n audio recorder. Bernard puts the machine through its paces and concludes his review with the words: … Read more

Look What They’ve Done to My Song (and other time-aligned data and analysis), Ma

5 February 201131 July 2009 by admin

At the Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute in Berkeley last week (17-19th July) the National Science Foundation sponsored Cyberling 2009, a workshop exploring how computational infrastructure (called “cyberinfrastructure” in the US, and e-Science or e-Humanities in the UK) can support linguistic research in a variety of fields. There was a panel discussion about data sharing that looked at the proposal:

“A cyberinfrastructure for linguistic data would allow unprecedented access [to] the empirical base of our field, but only if we collectively build that empirical base by contributing data. This panel addresses the benefits of data sharing and the obstacles to the widespread adoption of sharing practices, from the perspective of a variety of subfields”

But the bulk of the workshop was given over to closed discussion sessions by seven working groups looking at annotation standards, other standards, new multi-purpose software (so-called “killer apps”), data reliability and provenance, models from other fields, funding sources, and collaboration structure. The group discussions and resulting final day presentations are available on the Cyberling Wiki.
I was co-chair of Working Group 4 that was charged with discussing “protecting data reliability and provenance”, i.e. how to keep track of the creation of data and analysis and its passage through the electronic infrastructure as researchers access and use each other’s materials. As the Cyberling Wiki says, this is crucial

“for data creators (who need credit for the work they have done and the academic contribution of collecting, curating and annotating data) and the data users (who need to know where the data has come from so they can form an opinion of how much credence to give it and how to give proper credit to the originator of the data)”.

We also looked at how to establish a culture of data sharing and what mechanisms might be put in place to encourage people to share data. Clearly, for endangered language research where data are unique and fragile, these are very important issues.
After two and a half days of intense discussions our group came up with a set of proposals relating to data reliability and provenance that can be summarised as follows:

Endangered languages and technology in the New York Times

5 February 201128 July 2009 by admin

The New York Times has just published an article about the role technology plays in helping to save endangered languages. A few specific projects are mentioned, including some work supported by SOAS and MPI Nijmegen and our own mobile phone dictionary project.

Fieldwork workshops

5 February 201110 May 2009 by admin

It seems that linguistic fieldwork has become a topic that is attracting quite a lot of interest lately. As Sheena Van Der Mark from La Trobe University recently wrote, there will be a workshop on Non-linguistic aspects of fieldwork at the Australian Linguistic Society annual conference in July.
On the 22nd of this month, SOAS Linguistics Department will be hosting a workshop on Teaching field linguistics techniques, organised in conjunction with the LLAS, the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, the UK national body which supports teaching of languages, linguistics and area studies in higher education. We anticipate roughly 40 attendees, including students interested in learning more about fieldwork, and staff who are considering how fieldwork might fit into the linguistics curriculum. Presentations will be given by staff and post-graduate students from SOAS, Manchester University and Queen Mary, University of London, covering the following topics (in line with my remarks from two years ago here and here (see especially the comments section), we are aiming to cover a range of fieldwork types, including language documentation-type fieldwork and urban sociolinguistic-type fieldwork):

Sacred Earth Network – Endangered Languages Program

5 February 201124 April 2009 by Jane Simpson

[passed on from the Foundation for Endangered Languages] Media release: Sacred Earth Network, a non-profit organization located in Petersham, Massachusetts, is continuing its Endangered Languages Program after its successful launch in 2008. Endangered Languages Program aims to support preservation and revival of those indigenous languages which are threatened with extinction and which are vital to … Read more

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.

How to import a basic transcript into ELAN

5 February 201129 November 2008 by admin

The problem: you have text files and audio files, but the text files are not aligned to the audio files.
I imagine there are a few readers out there who have transcriptions of audio files that never made it past an utterance per line text file. This is a post for you, if you’d like to know how to import and time-align those files in ELAN.

Cold dead media

5 February 201127 October 2008 by Jane Simpson

PARADISEC’s director Linda Barwick has been raising the alarm for years about the way media are becoming obsolete because the machines to read them are dying. So it was very sad to hear the death-rattle on the CHILDES list in this message from Brian MacWhinney Dear Colleagues, It appears that we are now just about … Read more