At the same time in Australia we are reinforcing English monolingualism by reducing the opportunities to learn languages at university. The fees and Government support don’t pay the full costs. So yesterday yet another Australian university announced it is giving up teaching languages – Spanish, Chinese and Japanese at the University of Canberra. This follows on Curtin University announcing it was thinking of similar cuts.

The argument is that students can always study languages on the web/in another university. But the reality is that language learning is hard work, speaking another language requires intensive oral practice, students are doing part-time work, and the time and effort required to go to another university make languages just all too hard (and cross-institutional enrolment is a world of pain). SO, do it on the web? Sure – but it COSTS real money to put courses online and make them interactive enough and attractive enough to overcome the inherent problems of learning a spoken language on-line. And money to do that is exactly what universities don’t have.

The reality is that, as more universities close down languages, fewer students will learn languages, and there will be a shrinking pool of Australians who understand the societies where those languages are spoken.

At ANU we are experimenting with teaching Portuguese – 240+ million speakers, but barely taught in Australia. We can only do this thanks to generous support from the Embassy of Brazil and a Portuguese language endowment we have set up. That’s scary.

But then so is a fund-starved university education system where law has become more attractive to students than pure maths, agriculture and physics. No wonder we are falling behind in educating primary and secondary school students – if we don’t teach science and languages at universities, where will the next generations of science and language teachers come from?

After talking with Manfred Krifka and Kilu von Prince and seeing their work (the Daakie literacy book and Sóróusian ne vilye Ambrym: Siiwisian ne or Ambrym) being printed by Amazon’s online service (CreateSpace), I took the same pdf files I had previously created and uploaded them to Amazon. Within a couple of days all the checks had been done and Natrauswen nig Efat is now available online for less than $7. The pdf version is downloadable for free (http://repository.unimelb.edu.au/10187/9734). It will also be available for Kindle!

I talked about some gaps in the current language documentation workflow and tools that could help fill them, in particular ExSite9 for improving metadata collection, and EOPAS for presenting text and media online for citation and verification.

Christian Chanard and Amina Mettouchi showed a hybrid version of Elan they have developed that allows parsing and morphological labeling, as well as another tool that allows websearching of Elan files. http://corpafroas.tge-adonis.fr/tools.html

Joshua Crowgey presented on behalf of his co-authors (Emily M. Bender, Fei Xia, Michael Wayne Goodman) about extraction of grammatical information directly from interlinear glossed text (IGT) that can be used to boot-strap the development of precision implemented grammars (RiPLes: information engineering and synthesis for Resource Poor Languages).

Alexander König from the MPI outlined the problems encountered by the heterogeneous nature of the linguistic annotations deposited by DoBeS teams, and, suggested that, rather than try to develop a new standard, we try to make the existing annotation standards more interoperable and easier to understand. A service that could help here is ISOCat which is a registry of category types to which, for example, ELAN tiers could be mapped to allow users to work with them without knowing that they are.

Nikolaus Himmelmann’s presentation, titled ‘Some small things that would be a big help in processing fieldwork data’ made a plea for tools to enforce filenaming conventions and for maintaining version control of files created by collaborative teams. He argued that the capture of metadata should be able to be automated rather than needing to be entered by the researcher. He also hoped there could be a way of speeding up the preliminary segmentation of recorded speech (and gesture).

Using R for linguistic analysis is not new, but applying it to a corpus of IGT to be able to answer queries like this is new: “find all records in the corpus where the first word has a locative case marker and the finite verb is not the last word”. Taras Zakharko gave examples of his R scripts, called ToolboxSearch and available here: bitbucket.org/tzakharko/toolboxsearch

Frank Seifart, Jan Strunk and Florian Schiel showed a set of analyses of alignment of transcripts and media using WebMAUS. While this is working well for mainstream languages, their presentation showed very good results for a range of small languages, with results on new languages being comparable to results on German. As they note, this is a promising tool for the alignment of transcripts in heritage corpora.

Ciprian Gestenberger talked about the importance of creating well-annotated corpora for empirically based analyses. He also emphasized the need to take care in converting between formats that nothing is lost in the conversion.

Peter Bouda showed the use of python scripts and GrAF and POIO to create a data structure that can be presented as IGT. He showed the powerful ways of working with Toolbox and Elan files using annotation graphs as the basic structure and then having multiple possible outputs from the same dataset. http://www.peterbouda.eu/post/38219312158/annotation-graphs-and-the-ipython-notebook

Seunhen Lee and EmilyElfner talked about ‘web browser-based search and visualization architecture for complex multilevel linguistic corpora with diverse types of annotation’ . They ask, what can databases do for syntax‐phonology interface research and will it be possible to show correlations between prosodic phrasing and syntactic units, for example. They are using Annis2 http://www.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/annis/, which, it seems, requires some technical knowledge to install postgres and then Annis from a command line.

Finally, Kilu von Prince showed common problems with Toolbox data from her corpus of over 6000 sentences in Daakaka and her approach to dealing with them, using XML. The format is PAULA XML and will be hosted on the ANNIS platform (http://annis2.sfb632.uni-potsdam.de/Annis/search.html). Conversion into other formats is provided for by SaltNPepper (https://korpling.german.hu-berlin.de/p/projects/saltnpepper/wiki/).

Darrell Tryon

Darrell Tryon documented new and old languages in Vanuatu, the Solomons and Australia, helped speakers work on their own languages, and wrote about the history of languages. Initial short obituaries have appeared: in Tahiti Infos. Malcolm Ross’s short obituary is republished here. Uri Tadmor’s (Mouton de Gruyter) is on Linguistlist, and ends with “We will all miss Darrell’s kindness, charm, and humor as well as his great scholarship.” To which, add his practical low-key attitude to solving problems and getting excellent ventures underway.

Kim McKenzie

Kim McKenzie was a widely loved and admired ethnographic film-maker who made a number of collaborative and innovative documentaries and multi-media projects about people in remote Indigenous Australia, ranging from the amazing People of the Rivermouth: the Joborr Texts of Frank Gurrmanamana, made with Les Hiatt, to documentaries made with Murray Garde and Bininj Kunwok people: Fragments of the Owl’s Egg (2005), Kun-wok, kun-bolkken: The Language of Land (2006), and, more recently work on climate change and Indigenous people: Fighting Carbon with fire (2009). He’d worked in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies before moving to ANU and helping get the Digital Humanities Hub underway.

Farewell Darrell, farewell Kim.

This month’s discussion focused on the ways in which we engage with the speakers of the languages that we study. The general understanding of community engagement was work that you do that doesn’t necessarily directly benefit your own linguistic goals, but which will be of benefit or interest to the speakers you work with. Not all engagement is the same though. We had a range of experiences to draw on – although what is always readily apparent in these conversations is that every field site and group of speakers offers a unique situation. As always, please feel free to leave your own experiences in the comments below to broaden the conversation!

Steven Bird, recently returned from fieldwork in South America, was kind enough to share his experiences of working across three different sites in Brazil with us. Steven’s model of fieldwork literally puts the project’s success in the hands of the language speakers, by distributing networked mobile phones with which speakers can record and translate spoken texts. Therefore, having the widest possible number of people participate, and having the approval of community leaders, is vital for his work to be most effective. Things didn’t always work out smoothly, with the first community chief failing to take interest in the project as Steven hadn’t brought the internet with him (a logistically impossible task that Steven had not actually promised). Without the approval of the chief it became difficult to work with many people in the community. In the second village Steven presented the project as an exchange from the outset, but instead of being interested in any linguistic outputs, the community requested that Steven pay for the concrete floor of a community computer centre.

Steven’s experiences involved several themes that came up throughout the rest of the discussion. The first is why we do community engagement, the second is what we do to enact community engagement and the third is the benefits and problems that can come from building this into our work expectation. I’ll go through each of these topics in turn.

The general consensus at the discussion evening was that community engagement is something that we do because we like the people that we work with. We feel thankful for their time and effort and want to share a richer relationship with these groups of people rather than just as an outsider who turns up occasionally. Of course, LIP participants form a rather a self selecting survey group, and there are other more prosaic motivations for trying to engage people in our work. The first is that there is a general agreement that we have a duty to the people we work with to make our interaction mutually beneficial, and not just about collecting data for ourselves. The other reason is that a more engaged community may be more willing to help you in your work, although there is a possibility that they will become more focused on the collaborative project and this can take away your time from your more academic aims. Finally, there is a general feeling that funding and ethics bodies look more favourably on projects that involve some time of collaborative work, and the media and general public certainly do. While all of this can sound like rather cynical motivations for collaboration, there is not use pretending that everything we do is about the warm-and-fuzzy factor.

In terms of what we do when we participate in collaboration, there were a few parameters and variations that are worth discussing. The way you engage with a community depends on the structure of that group, and your place within it. For communities that have hierarchical leadership, such as Steven’s Brazilian chief, it may be best to engage with the community through these formalised channels. Others who work for extended periods in communities with official leaders say that over time they move towards paying official deference to them, but work more with other members of the community to avoid being caught up accidentally in local politics. Sometimes there may be both a local leadership structure and a separate language authority, which can make navigating who to work with difficult. There are also situations where the community is spread out, or where there are no formalised leadership structures. This is the case in the Yolmo communities where I work, where the household is the highest formalised unit of organisation. In these situations people felt that trying to work with as many individuals as possible, and engaging socially with others, was the closest that we could come to engaging with ‘the community’ instead of a small subset of individuals.

Even those who worked with official community structures never felt that they had full community participation, instead many collaborative efforts occur when working with one or two particularly motivated members of the community who take an in interest in our work. Therefore ‘community engagement’ can vary between projects (or even between fieldtrips) in regards to just how many people are engaged. There also appeared to be a difference in the effectiveness of different engagement attempts dependent on whether the community was interested in their own language or not. Another difference is that those who do urban fieldwork in their own city of residence may feel that community engagement can become very time consuming.

In regards to the type of collaborative work we participate in, there were two broad categories discussed. The first is collaboration on language-based projects, and the second is other types of engagement. Linguistic collaborations may have more or less direct relevance to your own project work. It may involve making a dictionary or phrase book, or recording and writing out stories or other folk knowledge. Just how much this is useful to your work depends on your work methods and project aims. A dictionary will not take as much time away from your own work if you make it out of the lexical database in your FLeX/Toolbox project, and traditional stories may be a genre that can be used in your analysis. The finer points of these projects do often involve many of the skills we already have as language documentation workers, although they can be time consuming to produce, both for you and the people you are working with.

One type of language-based work that was discussed was that of Bible translations, or helping to reprint existing religous materials. Of course, for some people this is the major motivation for engaging with communities in the first place. For others, participating in this community-reqested work is something that they may not feel comfortable doing. It’s worth acknowledging that this is a decision people will have to make, and how they may feel about it.

Just because we are there as people interested in the local language, this does not always mean that the community are interested in engaging in this work. We talked about how community engagement may actually involve other things. The majority of the time this can involve purchasing things for the community. Examples that came up quite often involved the linguist being called on to provide something that would be used. Examples from our discussion involved purchasing concrete to make a floor, plastic flowers and, of course, the internet. Sometimes the requests can be financially onerous, and generally fall outside the scope of fieldwork funding, while other times it can be as simple as filming the local football game.

This lead to an interesting discussion about what limits people had for their community engagement. There was a lot of discussion from people who worked in the north of Australia about local people (not friends of the fieldworker necessarily) asking for money or goods. While this may seem like an uncomfortable interaction for most linguists, there is a cultural perspective to it as well. In some communities it is just a way to have some level of interaction with outsiders, in others the expectation is that the person will say ‘no’ and it’s more of a game than an expectation. On some level, choosing to participate in these interactions is a form of community engagement. Ina similar manner, deciding whether to drink the locally made alcohol, or live with a family are also, on some level community engagement choices that some people in some fieldsites will have to make as well, as it can affect their relationship with the people they work with.

The final theme that came out of the discussion is the benefits and downsides to various models of community engagement. The first thing people felt was that any community engagement they participated in generally increased goodwill and opened up many opportunities. Where the engagement focused on linguistic materials people felt that more often than not this enriched their own work as well as providing something that the speakers wanted. There are the realities of how much time, or money, that are given over to community engagement – this won’t always be something that can be written into the project timeline or expenses, although it would be nice for it to be acknowledged more formally as a part of our work. Each group that we work with have a different set of expectations and interests, and different linguists may be better at engaging with communities in certain ways – but it’s something to certainly strive for.

Memory of the World event 14/5/2013 Adelaide

Through the Australian Memory of the World Register, the Committee, mostly volunteers, are building public awareness of the importance of maintaining records and objects associated with events important to many people. It’s harder to burn down a library if the people who see the flames believe the burning contents are valuable to them. [burn down = de-fund].

In 2001, the first items were added to the Australian Register: James Cook’s Endeavour journal, the Mabo case documents, and landmark constitutional documents. Not a bad balance. This year, 11 items were added, bringing the total to 49.

The event of inscribing these items in the register took place on 14 May 2013 in the splendid Mortlock Chamber of the South Australian State Library with its vaulted ceiling and storied galleries of books. Before the ceremony, I wandered past the Treasures Wall, looking at nineteenth century collections of things and their representations: birds’ eggs, illustrations and classifications of beetles, plants and mushrooms, geological maps, diaries, and J B Cleland’s notes from the Taman Shud case.

Master Henry Gilbert’s bird egg collection

These South Australian realia collections made a good frame for thinking about the parallels between them and the kinds of documents inscribed in the Australian Register. Some of the 11 new items were as curious as the pie-dish beetle, others as well organised as the fungus collection, others as decorative as Fiveash’s wildflower paintings, still others — like the records of indentured labourers and convicts — promising stories as sad and sinister as Taman Shud.

Jared Thomas, a Nukunu writer and researcher gave a short speech saying how helpful and important the documentations of the past was — and he mentioned the Norman Tindale collection, one of the 11 new treasures. This has been important for him as a writer, and for him as a Nukunu given the Nukunu native title claims. People could take or challenge the representations given in the early documentation, and could move to the future equipped with a strong understanding of the present and a very strong understanding of the past.

Almost all items come from large state or national institutions with recurrent funding. The items range from sound recordings, the John Meredith folklore collection* of the National Library, to the Holtermann collections of glass negatives taken by Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss of the Hill End, Mudgee and Gulgong goldfields (State Library of NSW) and F E Williams’ photographs of Papua New Guinea (National Archives and South Australian Museum), to individual items like Colonel William Light’s plan of Adelaide (State Library of South Australia), Thomas Burstow’s eyewitness diary of the bombing raids on Darwin (Northern Territory Library), and three diaries of the goldfields (including Edward Snell’s lovely illustrated diary) (State Library of Victoria), to particular types of records (Convict Records of Western Australia 1838–1910 (State Records Office of Western Australia), and Queensland South Sea Island Indentured Labourer Records 1863–1908 (Queensland State Archives)), to the comprehensive records of the first 50 years of the University of Adelaide.

So it is pretty wonderful that, only ten years after its beginning, and without recurrent fundng, UNESCO has recognised the importance of PARADISEC’s collection through inscribing it on this list. And it follows on PARADISEC’s inclusion in the ‘UNESCO Register of Good Practices in Language Preservation [.doc]’ in 2005. This recognition is a tribute to collaboration — to Linda Barwick and Nick Thieberger and their team, to their universities, and to how much they have achieved on shoestrings. (Note: you can strengthen PARADISEC’s shoestring by sponsoring them — and it’s tax-deductible).

* This award was accepted by Kevin Bradley, and it was a great pleasure to thank him once again for all the help and advice he gave PARADISEC when it was still an egg.

Sponsored by the Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA), the MARCS Institute (UWS) and the School of Humanities and Communication Arts (UWS)

This workshop has a thematic focus on the phonetics and phonology of Australian Indigenous languages. The aim is to bring together specialists in this area to discuss current theoretical issues in order to produce outlines for concrete research projects involving interdisciplinary collaboration on a regional and international level.

This two-day event will involve a first day of presentations and discussions focused specifically on circulating and disseminating ideas and topics that are in need of collaborative investigation as well as initiating possible collaborative projects. Six invited specialists in the field will outline strategic initiatives of priority research in the phonetics and phonology of Australian Indigenous languages. On the second day, these leads will be taken up by smaller project groups with the specific aim to generate viable outlines of proposals which will then be further developed for submission to national and international funding bodies within the following year/funding cycle if possible.

The workshop is open to ASSTA members free of charge. A limited number of PhD student travel awards are also available: For more information please email marcsevents@uws.edu.au

Strategic initiatives presented by:

Prof. Andy Butcher (Flinders University)
Dr. Brett Baker (University of Melbourne)
A/Prof. Janet Fletcher (University of Melbourne)
Dr. Mark Harvey (University of Newcastle)
Dr. Erich Round (University of Queensland)
A/Prof.Marija Tabain (La Trobe University)

For further information please email to marcsevents@uws.edu.au.
See also http://www.assta.org/?q=AuIL-workshop

Last month we focused on outputs from language documentation projects that could be of use to the language-speaking communities we work with, and a wider audience. This month, inspired by the LD&C special publication on the Potentials of Language Documentation) we turned to looking at how the same projects could also be used for research beyond the immediate scope of the initial documentation project. This discussion took in a wide range of areas -  including returning to older data, the kinds of projects that can be undertaken when revisiting existing corpora and the realities of building a corpus during a documentation project.

For the sake of our discussion we took “corpus” in regards to language documentation projects to mean a collection of audio and/or video recordings with (optimally) time-aligned transcription and some degree of interlinear glossing and metadata descriptions of the content and speakers. A well-structured corpus of this kind can then be interrogated from a range of perspectives – quantitative corpus linguistics, projects looking at related languages or features, or typologists looking for the broadest range of phenomena. This can allow for greater cross-linguistic comparison, or for people to return to existing data with new questions.

The scope of what can be done with an existing corpus of material from language documentation projects is only limited by the nature of the collected data and the types of questions we want to ask of the data. There are a number of projects underway at the moment to turn existing printed collections of data into digital collections to make out ability to work with them more powerful by fully accessing and interrogating what is there. As one example, the Daisy Bates collection held in the Australian National Library, Barr Smith Library (SA) and Battye Librarby (WA) contains 8,600 pages of manuscripts with at least 123 speakers named, but in their current printed state we aren’t even sure how many languages are represented. By digitising the collection researchers will be able to gain a better idea of what is present in the collection, and enrich this will additional information. I’m sure there are many other examples of this kind of work, and we’d love to hear about them in the comments section below!

As many of us present at the evening are currently working on language documentation projects, attention was paid to what we should be aiming to do now to ensure that the corpora we build will be as useful as possible for future research. There is a need to ensure that the workflow involves any transcription tools that will be in open formats so they can be used by others in the future. Collecting enough metadata so that it is clear who the speakers are in each recording, and the nature of the recordings is also important. There was some concern that focusing overly on the corpus output might distract us from collecting as much data as possible. Transcribing and  marking up recordings and texts is time consuming work, that often has little recognition in terms of academic outputs (although this will hopefully change). While modern tools and digital methods have certainly made the work we do more powerful, we are now expected to do more in less time, and building a well-structured corpus of data is just one expectation. This is not necessarily a bad thing – after all, many of the outputs discussed at the March LIP are possible with well-structured data as well – but the time cost of building better corpora during language documentation projects is still something that needs to be discussed.

There was also a concern that the realities of documenting a language do not always match the ideals of corpus linguistics. For languages that have not had any prior documentation the forms that are transcribed and the glosses applied to them may vary across multiple years of work. Also, future work can only be done addressing what has been captured. For example, there is potential for some excellent studies into the use of gesture in a wide range of languages, but this can only be done where video has been used for data collection. Likewise, many language documentation projects occur where there is more than one language – meaning there is potential to study the relationship between the target language of the original project and any contact language or other languages in the recordings, but many language documentation projects will only transcribe the target language. This is not necessarily a criticism of current workflows, as it comes back to the discussion about the realities of fitting everything into time available, but it is a reminder that we should strive to enrich the data we have collected as much as possible, but also that not all existing corpora will be useful for all potential future research questions and that even with the best-organised data additional labeling or analysis may be inevitable.

Finally, there was a discussion about whether people would be willing to share corpora they collected with other researchers. While everyone seemed happy to return to their own data with new questions, there is still a discomfort with sharing data with others. Hopefully as more researcher make their data available, and people can be more comfortable with discussing the content of language documentation corpora, there can be greater acknowledgement of the fact that they are always a work in progress. This will hopefully lead to more interesting work being done with the output of existing projects.

“Language Nests in Schools aim to provide Aboriginal students and their families with a continuous pathway for learning from pre-school to Year 12 and into tertiary education (TAFE and universities) and to offer Aboriginal students a new opportunity to consider language teaching as a vocation.”

“The Ministerial Taskforce on Aboriginal Affairs recommended that Aboriginal Language and Culture Nests be trialled initially in one location each from five Aboriginal language groups: Gamilaraay; Gumbaynggirr; Bundjalung; Paarkintji/Barkindji; and Wiradjuri.”
“based on various pre-conditions for success, including:
• The number of language speakers
• The availability of language teachers
• The availability of language resources
• The level of commitment and activity around language revitalisation within local schools
• Proximity to the resources, infrastructure and support available through local communities and regional AECG networks, TAFEs, universities and schools.
Lessons learned will then be shared with other Aboriginal language groups to support communities aspiring to rejuvenate and revitalise their local Aboriginal language.”

“The Language Nests initiative will serve as a springboard for both school students and community members to access language learning pathways, beginning as early as pre-school and continuing into high school and further education. To achieve this, we need to grow the number of teachers of language – both in the community, at home, in the classroom and at TAFE or university. The NSW Government believes that if we invest in both people and the development of resources we can increase the number of language teachers and speakers.”

Our first Melbourne LIP for the year at our regular venue got off to a rocky start when the function room was usurped by the local Touch Football team. Fortunately, we had such an excellent turn out – especially of local honours and PhD students – that we were able to make do in the general area by breaking up into smaller groups to discuss this month’s topic.

Most of the points discussed below are from either the discussion I participated in, and the general summary discussion we had at the end. This means ideas and discussion points may not be attributed to the correct people, but you’re welcome to add clarifying remarks in the comments below.

Our topic of discussion this week was to consider what kinds of outputs we can create from language documentation projects. We narrowed this down in the discussion to the kind of outputs we can create that are relevant for language speakers and communities we work with, and decided to leave discussion of other outputs for another time. It was apparent that across all the groups there was a genuine concern to make what we do relevant to the groups of speakers that we work with. There were two main methods for creating outputs for communities, the first was to build them into the project from the beginning, and the second was to create opportunistic outputs once a project was under way.

Of those outputs that can be created from an existing set of project resources, a dictionary was one of the most frequently mentioned. With the use of MDF (Multi-Dictionary Formatter) in Toolbox, FLeX or LexiquePro, the making of a dictionary can happen in a few clicks. Of course, to do this requires that the lexicon collected is well structured, and that you understand form early on what the process should look like, but if you set things up well at the start this has very effective flow-on in terms of the time saved. More specific lexical lists – such as those focusing on flora or fauna can also be made in a similar way from an existing lexicon, provided you’ve caught more information than “a plant” or “a type of fish” for most of the items of this type. Likewise, collections of stories can be made relatively efficiently from existing Toolbox or Elan transcripts, as can subtitles for video material recorded.

While these types of outputs can be made in a relatively time-efficient manner, there are also outputs that people have made that require more work. Some people discussed requests for educational materials to teach the language, which can involve a large amount of work (and even though it is wanted, may not be used). Others talked about being requested to film events like the local football game, or helping to publish stories or a history of the community. Some of this may involve skills beyond a person’s regular skill set, such as video editing, orthography creation or book formatting.

While everyone was optimistic about the kinds of outputs that could be created, there was also a lot of discussion about the feasibility of some of these aspirations. Everyone certainly thought they were an important component of a linguist’s work, but given how little credit they receive as part of an academic model of language documentation, it is not possible to do everything we hope to. Trying to find a balance was something that we kept returning to.

Part of this is about negotiating with the community. This involves being realistic about constraints (there may be no use building a website if there is no electricity or internet in a village). It may also involve asking them to contribute time to the project as well, which may in turn involve training people. Of course, this would mean that you may also end up negotiate doing work that you might not really wish to do (such as translating texts into the language).

Many people discussed how, even if it does not feel like it at the time, these community-focused outputs can have longer term benefits. Nick Thieberger mentioned that the language learning materials he created for one group have only really been used a couple of decades after they were made. Others talked about how recording videos of local events lead to rich discursive or narrative data – either form the video itself or people narrating back events afterwards. Likewise, standardising items for a dictionary, or narrative, can give everyone involved in the project a more focused chance to consider data that has already been collected. Working with speakers on a language outside of our regular area of linguistic focus can also introduce us to new areas we may never have explored, such as ethnobotany, musicology or education. Thus, while there may not be immediate academic output, we can branch into new academic areas of inquiry.

If you have any community-focused projects you’ve created as part of a documentation project, and would like to reflect on that experience, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.

Our next Melbourne LIP will be in April, with the date and topic to be announced soon. If you can’t make it to Melbourne, then there’s always the new and exciting Brisbane chapter of LIP:

The first discussion session will be held at 7pm on Wednesday 27 March at the German Club, which is at 416 Vulture St, Woolloongabba.

Felicity Meakins will be facilitating a discussion based on the paper Contact languages
as “endangered” languages: What is there to lose? by Paul Garrett.