Endangered Languages and Cultures

Home-made video stabiliser

5 February 201117 October 2006 by admin

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

5 February 201116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

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’.

Desert: forcing Aborigines off their land

5 February 201113 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Pretty soon the remote areas of Australia will be uninhabited. Drought and high fuel prices are forcing farmers and graziers off their land. And these, together with Government policies, are forcing Aborigines off their land. Along with the departure of the people will go their languages and societies. Gary Johns writes in The Australian (11/10/06):
“The Government has begun to stop supporting a recreational lifestyle in the name of preserving a culture.”
Apparently Aborigines are to be ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ (Johns’ words) in fringe camps around bigger towns. He thinks this is a Good Idea.

Endangered languages, cultures and the Australian Research Council lottery

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Australian Research Council’s website today has survived the pressure of everyone wanting to know whether they’ve got winning tickets. I was in a few syndicates (PARADISEC, continuing the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA project), and a new project on Indonesian). And the lucky winners are…

Indigenous language teaching and tasting

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

There’ve been two recent stories in the media about Indigenous language education – one on teaching Yuwaalaraay, the language of the Walgett area of NSW to local children, and the other on teaching the Western Australian language Bunuba in a private school in Melbourne. One’s about language revival, and the other’s about language tasting.

Two new jobs in language documentation and endangered languages

5 February 201111 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

The Endangered Languages Academic Programme, Linguistics Department, School of Oriental and
African Studies, University of London, is seeking to appoint a Lecturer in Endangered Languages and a Post-doctoral Researcher in Language Documentation .

Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: a preliminary program

5 February 201110 October 2006 by admin

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

Ethics and the researcher

5 February 20119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Behaving in a good way to the people one is working with is vital – unethical researchers do damage to communities in the short-term. And they do incalculable longterm damage, because communities that feel burned by researchers will reject other research proposals which might benefit them. There’s a new publication addressed to Indigenous people on how to deal with health researchers. It’s a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) booklet Keeping research on track: a guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about health research ethics. In the past, the NHMRC guidelines for working with Indigenous people have been taken as models in other disciplines. And so it’s important for us to look at them, even though linguists don’t go sticking needles into people, and a grammar is of less direct benefit than the results of a study of the causes of kidney failure.

Sustainable data from fieldwork: workshop

5 February 20118 October 2006 by admin

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

News: Papuan programme

5 February 20117 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

James McElvenny has put up the preliminary program for the Pearl Beach workshop on Papuan languages. How can you miss “Kalam Rhyming Jingles” “Books, papayas and chicken cries in Bunak”, or the drum rolling finale: Mark Donohue “The end of Papuan”? The workshop runs from the evening of Friday the 27th of October to Sunday … Read more