Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork Conference

Our December conference is almost full, so if you were thinking of coming along, now is the time to register! The preliminary schedule is up, papers have been reviewed, everything is going along nicely (touch wood). The third day of the conference is a workshop, with sections on audio and video recording, transcribing and managing … Read more

Home-made video stabiliser

Here are some instructions to build your own video stabiliser (via Make). Its a copy of a much more expensive commercial version, designed to reduce shake in your video recordings. Of course, its not really going to help you be inconspicuous during your recordings…

Sand talk – and how to record it


In Central Australia, you often see Aboriginal people sitting on the ground, talking, and simultaneously drawing on the sand, smoothing it over when they’ve finished a point, and starting again. They might be recounting places along a journey, listing family members, drawing maps, or describing the movement of characters in a story. I’ll call this ‘sand talk’.

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Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: a preliminary program

The preliminary schedule for the conference “Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: from creation to archive and back” is now up. There looks to be some really interesting projects on display. I had a sneak peek at EOPAS, a project to create a workflow and display interlinearised texts, and annodex, a project to display multiple streams … Read more

Sustainable data from fieldwork: workshop

RNLD in collaboration with the conference “Sustainable data from fieldwork” is offering a day-long session on the creation, organisation, annotation and display of digital media. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in making digital recordings and annotating them. If you’re new to shoebox or ELAN and have any questions about using it, and you have your own data, then bring along your laptop. The workshop will be held at Sydney University on Wednesday, December 6, 2006.
Read on for the specifics

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Recording naturalistic conversation just got even easier

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.

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HCSNet Summer School 2006

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

Geo-tagging your photos

There’s an interesting post on slashdot today, on a product that will geo-tag your photos. Geo-tagging a photo means recording some geographic information at the time you take your photo, typically the longitude and latitude.
At first glance I thought it might be another on of these data-loggers, but actually, with a minor addition, it’s a pretty nifty bit of hardware.

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Non-intrusive video taping or spying on your informants?

(Following a previous post and a reply from Claire at Anggarrgoon)
Is it possible to reduce the intrusiveness of video taping someone?
Before I launch into this… let me just say: “flashing lights and ethical alarm bells!”. What I’m going to talk about is the paradox of fully informing your informants that you’re going film them, and then trying your hardest to seem like you’re not there!

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