Technology

Using video in language documentation: a LIP discussion

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This is a recap of Linguistics in the Pub held at Prince Alfred Hotel, Carlton on Tuesday the 6th of September written by Lauren Gawne. From now on this will be a regular feature here at Endangered Languages and Cultures.

For the topic of video in language documentation we were lucky to be joined by Joe Blythe (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) and Jenny Green (ELDP funded Postdoc at The University of Melbourne), who have both worked extensively with video and both recently returned from fieldwork. Joe started off the session by talking us through some of his data. Joe has just returned from a field trip in Wadeye where he is continuing to collect conversational data. On this trip Joe tried working with some new speakers and some of his regular speakers but in different environments. He found it interesting that a shift in location for people he worked with regularly, for example into a house instead of out bush, would lead to very different behaviour towards the camera. He was very kind to show us not only some of his excellent (and often quite scenic) data but also some of these less successful attempts. Even less successful recordings are interesting in their own way.

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NRPIPA Symposium in Darwin 13-14 August 2011

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Another stunning array of papers and associated performances will feature at the 10th Annual Symposium of NRPIPA (The National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia). This year there will be a focus on community databases for access to recordings. Venue: North Australian Research Unit, The Australian National University, Darwin, 13–14 August 2011 Presented in … Read more

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Books, HTML, audio, images – falling out from fieldwork

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I’ll be going to Vanuatu next month courtesy of Catriona Hyslop’s DoBeS project, to help build an installation of three computer-based interactive dictionaries (Vurës, Tamambo and South Efate) for the Museum there. We will have hyperlinked dictionaries with sound and images where possible. All of this will be HTML-based for low maintenance and to allow new dictionaries to be added to the set over time. This post is aimed at outlining the method used to get these various files into deliverable formats and follows on from an earlier one where I talked about using ITunes to get media back to the village.

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A new transcription system

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Just over a year ago I wrote a blog post about some of the parameters involved in transcribing media files, and how long it takes to do various sorts of transcription, translation and annotation tasks. In the commentary on my post, the ELAN transcription software tool developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at … Read more

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Australian Humanities research infrastructure funding

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All Australian humanities scholars with an interest in digital scholarship should take this brief opportunity to read and comment on the federal government’s ‘2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure’ discussion paper. Why? Because the two previous ‘Roadmaps’ funded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘research infrastructure’, almost exclusively NOT in the Humanities, but … Read more

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Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC)

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I recently attended a symposium titled Models for capacity development in language documentation and conservation hosted by ILCAA at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The symposium brought together a group of people involved in supporting language work in the Asia-Pacific region in various ways (see the website for a full list): academic (Institute of Linguistics, Minhsiung, Taiwan, Beijing, China, Goroka, PNG, Batchelor, Australia, Bangkok, Thailand) and community-based (Manokwari, West-Papua; Tshanglalo, Bhutan; Bhasha Research Centre and Adivasi Academy, Gudjarat, India; Miromaa, Australia), using film (Sorosoro, France), or archiving language records (PARADISEC). The aim of the meeting was to build a network that would continue to link between training activities to support language work, the Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC), whose planning group members are listed here.

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Wunderkammer Import Package 2 final release

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The final release of Wunderkammer Import Package 2 is now available for download. Check out the Wunderkammer website for more info. Thanks to everyone who pointed out bugs and made suggestions for improvement. In this release several bugs have been squished and a bit of input validation and some friendlier error messages have been added. … Read more

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Wunderkammer Import Package 2

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The latest version of the Wunderkammer mobile phone dictionary software, Wunderkammer Import Package 2 Beta, is now available for download. The major advance in this distribution is a new easy to use graphical user interface. There’s also a new set of documentation to go with the new user interface. This is a beta release. We … Read more

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How can we get the material we have used in our research back to the people we recorded?

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Every time I revisited my fieldsite I was asked for copies of photos or recordings and I wanted some way that these could be accessed without me having to be present. When I started visiting Erakor village in central Vanuatu there was intermittent electricity available, usually only in the evenings in the house I lived in.

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