Nick Thieberger

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

Uppsala Language Documentation and Language Description workshop

5 February 20117 October 2008 by Nick Thieberger

A workshop on Language Documentation and Language Description was held at Uppsala University (30 September – 1 October 2008) as part of the 23rd Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics. Uppsala University was established in 1477 and the town has grown around the university, famous also as the place where Carl Linnaeus taught in the late 1700s.
The keynote speakers for the workshop were Michael Noonan and Donald Stilo, and the list of presenters can be found here. Of interest to ELAC readers will be the paper by Michael Riesler and Jacquelijn Ringersma on the software tools used to annotate Kildin Saami lexical data. They are using LEXUS, a lexical database created by the MPI for their DoBES teams. It has lots of nice features if you want to create various kinds of lexicons and if you don’t want to gloss texts (this team is using Toolbox to gloss texts), but it is only an online tool at the moment. It conforms to the Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) also incorporates ViCOS (Visualising Conceptual Spaces) which provides for semantic domains and for navigating a word-net through the lexicon.

Streaming access to transcribed media

5 February 201128 November 2007 by Nick Thieberger

After some effort PARADISEC has finally established a streaming server that can be used in normal web pages. This means that an online dictionary, for example, can have example headwords and sentences spoken, or video clips presented to illustrate a given word. You can see the trial version here, (NB this will only work with the Firefox browser and you will also need to pre-install the Annodex plugin).
For some time it has been troubling that we have no simple way of presenting media online in association with transcripts, especially when an archived field recording may be the only recording of a particular language. It should have been simple enough to access media on the web. After all, we do it on Youtube and other places. But we have been further constrained by really wanting all of this to be open source (freely available software) so that anyone with the right skills can replicate this setup and not have to pay. And we also wanted the process for getting material into an online presentation to follow on from normal fieldwork outcomes, in line with output from the tools typically used by a professional linguist (one who keeps up to date with the methods of their profession). When the archival form of the media exists in a repository, it should then be an automatable process to put it into a streaming server for access.

Modern ways for ancient words

5 February 201126 April 2007 by Nick Thieberger

This forum was held in Newcastle, Australia, 24-26 April 2007, coordinated by the Awarbukarl Cultural Resource Association (ACRA). Subtitled ‘Modern ways for ancient words’, it was organised by Daryn McKenny and his team (including Dianna Newman and Faith Baisden) who put together two and a half days of presentations on the state of ICT in Indigenous language (IL) programs. The forum had a number of sponsors, testament to Daryn’s ability to pull in support from various quarters, including DCITA, Telstra, Microsoft among others.
Representatives of language programs and language centres came from far and wide, including Townsville, Cairns, Port Hedland, Kalgoorlie, Bourke, Adelaide, Nambucca Heads, Sydney, Melbourne, Walgett, the Kimberley and New Zealand. We were given lots of information over the two days that I was there (I missed the last morning) and I’ll try to summarise it here. Apologies to anyone I’ve left out.