Nick Thieberger

Books, HTML, audio, images – falling out from fieldwork

10 June 201128 May 2011 by Nick Thieberger

I’ll be going to Vanuatu next month courtesy of Catriona Hyslop’s DoBeS project, to help build an installation of three computer-based interactive dictionaries (Vurës, Tamambo and South Efate) for the Museum there. We will have hyperlinked dictionaries with sound and images where possible. All of this will be HTML-based for low maintenance and to allow new dictionaries to be added to the set over time. This post is aimed at outlining the method used to get these various files into deliverable formats and follows on from an earlier one where I talked about using ITunes to get media back to the village.

Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship

13 April 2011 by Nick Thieberger

CALL FOR PAPERS Sustainable data from digital research: Humanities perspectives on digital scholarship Dates: 12-14th December 2011 Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia A PARADISEC conference http://paradisec.org.au/2011Conf.html Digital methods for recording information are now ubiquitous. In fieldwork-based disciplines, like linguistics, musicology, anthropology and so on, recordings are typically of high cultural value and there is great … Read more

Online interlinear text, and streaming media without Flash

19 July 20141 April 2011 by Nick Thieberger

Playing media on the web is nothing new. But playing the media that results from fieldwork, having transcripts highlighted to track timecodes in the video or audio, and having it all work without needing to install Flash or other streaming servers, this is new. So is having a path to upload from common fieldwork tools … Read more

Australian Humanities research infrastructure funding

1 April 201129 March 2011 by Nick Thieberger

All Australian humanities scholars with an interest in digital scholarship should take this brief opportunity to read and comment on the federal government’s ‘2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure’ discussion paper. Why? Because the two previous ‘Roadmaps’ funded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘research infrastructure’, almost exclusively NOT in the Humanities, but … Read more

Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC)

5 February 201119 November 2010 by Nick Thieberger

I recently attended a symposium titled Models for capacity development in language documentation and conservation hosted by ILCAA at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The symposium brought together a group of people involved in supporting language work in the Asia-Pacific region in various ways (see the website for a full list): academic (Institute of Linguistics, Minhsiung, Taiwan, Beijing, China, Goroka, PNG, Batchelor, Australia, Bangkok, Thailand) and community-based (Manokwari, West-Papua; Tshanglalo, Bhutan; Bhasha Research Centre and Adivasi Academy, Gudjarat, India; Miromaa, Australia), using film (Sorosoro, France), or archiving language records (PARADISEC). The aim of the meeting was to build a network that would continue to link between training activities to support language work, the Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC), whose planning group members are listed here.

Doing Great Things with Small Languages

5 February 201121 April 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Doing Great Things with Small Languages is an ARC funded project run by Nick Thieberger and Rachel Nordlinger at the University of Melbourne.

Linguists routinely record minority endangered languages for which no prior documentation exists. This is vitally important work which often records language structures and knowledge of the culture and physical environment that would otherwise be lost. However, while it is typical for the interpretation and analysis of this data to be published, the raw data is rarely made available.
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How can we get the material we have used in our research back to the people we recorded?

25 November 201424 March 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Every time I revisited my fieldsite I was asked for copies of photos or recordings and I wanted some way that these could be accessed without me having to be present. When I started visiting Erakor village in central Vanuatu there was intermittent electricity available, usually only in the evenings in the house I lived in.

Random locations of grammars and dictionaries

5 February 201117 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Further to the discussion of making online material discoverable (using standard metadata or via a more elaborate infrastructure proposed by ELIIP), other useful sources of free online grammars or dictionaries include ‘Online Books’ and the Project Gutenberg sites. These are ‘free’ as in unencumbered by intellectual property or copyright concerns, typically because the authors have been dead for over 50 years, not because they were placed in an open access archive. A sample of the files available follows, but wouldn’t it be great to have a way of announcing these items using standard metadata terms so they could all be searched via a dedicated language service? For example, the entry for Sgau Karen below is followed by Sgaw Karen, so google searching on Sgaw will only give you one of these three items.

Bypassing written documentation – oral annotation of recorded text

5 February 201115 February 2010 by Nick Thieberger

A large corpus of recorded oral tradition can be created using two recording machines, one playing back the spoken texts and the other used to capture an oral annotation. Recording speakers who are commenting on earlier recordings is a method for providing annotations that bypasses literacy.

Finding language material, Web2 or Wikipedia?

5 February 201113 December 2009 by Nick Thieberger

[From Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne] On the topic of trying to locate material in a small language, I was reading Kaisa Maliniemi’s 2009 article on the discovery of new linguistic material in Kven and Sámi in Norway’s public records archives. She discusses the fact that the records have been publicly available for some time … Read more