CALC (Central Australian Linguistic Circle) meeting

Central Australian Linguistic Circle (CALC) 2013  Monday 9 September 2013, 8:30 am – 4:00 pm Venue: Desert People’s Centre Function Room (next to the Irrarnte Café), Desert Knowledge Precinct, South Stuart Highway, Alice Springs Map: http://desertpeoplescentre.org.au/contact-us/ Program: 8:30 am          meet at Desert People’s Centre Function Room, set up, introductions 9:00-9:30      Cathy Bow, Charles … Read more

Rejoicing at AUSTRALEX

AUSTRALEX held its biennial conference in a surprisingly green Adelaide, and the tall gums were filled with birds rejoicing. It was the biggest AUSTRALEX conference I’ve ever been to, a range of speakers from around the world, the first one with parallel sessions, and by far the greatest media coverage of any Australian linguistics/lexicography conference … Read more

Who gives a Gonski for Indigenous education?

Who gives a Gonski for Indigenous Education? Answer: three Australian states and the Australian Senate which yesterday passed the Australian Education Reform bill, aka the Gonski plan. This is a wonderful achievement. Funding based on children’s needs. At last, schools with lots of disadvantaged Indigenous children can get funding by right and not by favour. … Read more

Fieldwork helper – ExSite9

ExSite9 is an open-source cross-platform tool for creating descriptions of files created during fieldwork. We have been working on the development of ExSite9 over the past year and it is now ready for download and use: http://www.intersect.org.au/exsite9 https://github.com/IntersectAustralia/exsite9/wiki/Install-packages

ExSite9 collects information about files from a directory on your laptop you have selected, and presents it to you onscreen for your annotation, as can be seen in the following screenshot. The top left window shows the filenames, and the righthand window shows metadata characteristics that can be clicked once a file or set of files is selected.The manual is here: http://bit.ly/ExSite9Manual

Researchers who undertake fieldwork, or capture research data away from their desks, can use ExSite9 to support the quick application of descriptive metadata to the digital data they capture. This also enables researchers to prepare a package of metadata and data for backup to a data repository or archive for safekeeping and further manipulation.

Scholars in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) typically need to organise heterogeneous file-based information from a multitude of sources, including digital cameras, video and sound recording equipment, scanned documents, files from transcription and annotation software, spreadsheets and field notes.

The aim of this tool is to facilitate better management and documentation of research data close to the time it is created. An easy to use interface enables researchers to capture metadata that meets their research needs and matches the requirements for repository ingestion.

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FEL call for grant applications

The Foundation for Endangered Languages has just announced that its 2012 grant application round is now open. Priority will be given to projects that focus on the revitalization of endangered languages and support the use of endangered languages in various spheres of community life (home, education, cultural and social life). Any language documentation proposals must … Read more

LDD 11 now available for order

Volume 11 of Language Documentation and Description is now available for pre-publication order from the SOAS online store at GBP 10, a 25% discount off the regular price. Copies will be shipped in early December. Volume 11 is edited by Peter K. Austin and Stuart McGill and is a collection of papers dealing with several … Read more

And another new book and conference

Moving from Nigeria to Australia… We in Australia owe thanks to Maïa Ponsonnet, Loan Dao and Margit Bowler, who have shepherded the Proceedings of the 42th ALS Conference – 2011 to publication online on the ANU Research Repository in close to record time. Papers on lesser-known languages (old, new, created) include: On Australian languages (old … Read more