Bursting through Dawes (2)

Further to my last post, I’ve read on, and my disappointment has only deepened at the treatment of the Sydney Language in Ross Gibson’s 26 views of the starburst world.

Think about the notes you made when you were getting into learning an undocumented language … Imagine they get archived and in a century or two someone looks through them and tries to work out what was going on when you made the notes.  With only shreds of metadata and general knowledge of the historical period to go on, the future reader makes inferences from the content. Could a cluster of words in one of your vocabulary lists point to a hunch you were checking? Or a sequence of illustrative sentences could be the skeletal narrative of a memorable experience shared with your teachers.

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Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

A two-day conference titled ‘Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures’ ran on June 29/30 in Cambridge, UK. Organised by the World Oral Literature Project, the conference brought together a range of ‘scholars, digital archivists and international organisations to share experiences of mapping ethno-linguistic diversity using interactive digital technologies.’ A discussion … Read more

Technology and language documentation: LIP discussion

Lauren Gawne recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

This week at Linguistics in the Pub it was all about technology, and how it impacts on our practices. The announcement for the session briefly outlined some of the ways technology has shaped expectations for language documentation:

The continual developments in technology that we currently enjoy are inextricably connected to the development of our field. Most would agree that technology has changed language documentation for the better. But while nobody is advocating a return to paper and pen, most would concur that technology has changed the way we work in unexpected ways. The focus is usually on the materials we produce such as video, audio and annotation files as well as particular types of computer-aided analysis. In a recent ELAC post, ‘Hammers and nails‘ Peter Austin claims that metadata is not what it was, in the days of good old reel-to-reel tape recorders. The volume of comments suggests that this topic is ripe for discussion. This session of Linguistics in the Pub will give us a chance to reflect on how our practices change with advances in technology. 

There are a (very) few linguists who advocate that researchers should go to the field with nothing beyond a spiral-bound notebook and a pen, though no one at the table was quite willing to go that far; all of us, it seems, go to the field with a good quality audio recorder at the very least. Without the additional recordings (be they audio or video) the only output of the research becomes the final papers written by the linguist, which are in no way verifiable. The recording of verifiable data, and the slowly increasing practice of including audio recordings in the final research output are allowing us to further stake our claim as an empirical and verifiable field of scientific inquiry. Many of us shared stories of how listening back to a recording that we had made enriched the written records that we have, or allow us to focus on something that wasn’t the target of our inquiry at the time of the initial recording. The task of trying to do the level of analysis that is now expected for even the lowliest sketch grammar is almost impossible without the aid of recordings, let alone trying to capture the subtleties present in naturalistic narrative or conversation.

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ELAR cracks a ton

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS reaches an important milestone this week when our 100th deposit goes online. We will be working on a further 10 deposits and doing additional curation work on those currently online over the next two months. ELAR now has 4 terabytes (4,000 gigabytes — double that I reported in … Read more

Australian Aboriginal Language Materials in ELAR

If you are interested in Australian Aboriginal languages you might like to take at look at the growing number of collections of audio, video and text materials that are now available in the ELAR archive. Currently there are six online collections (comprising almost 900 file bundles) for languages from northern Australia, with one more from … Read more

ELAR update update

In the past month (since my previous update post) the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has been moving ahead with leaps and bounds. We now have 66 deposits available on our website, with six more having been added on Monday this week. There are now 41,690 files available online, amounting to 2 terabytes (2,000 … Read more

Hammers and nails

Back in the old days when some of us were younger and starting out on our language documentation and description careers (for me in 1972, as described in this blog post) the world was pretty much analogue and we didn’t have digital hardware or software to think about. Back then recordings were made with reel-to-reel … Read more

The living archive of Aboriginal languages – call for expressions of interest

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST DEVELOP A USER-FRIENDLY SEARCH INTERFACE AND TOUCHPAD APP FOR A DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF LITERATURE IN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES THE LIVING ARCHIVE PROJECT Submission date: 30 April 2012 During the era of bilingual education in the NT, books were produced in 25 Literature Production Centres in more than 16 languages. These materials … Read more

ELAR update

As of this week the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has 52 online deposits available comprising around 51,000 files. There are 12,700 data bundles in the online collection, of which 6,000 are available to any registered user and a further 5,000 require access approval from the depositors. The number of users is now 515 … Read more