Fieldwork – Page 12 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork Conference

5 February 201118 October 2006 by admin

Our December conference is almost full, so if you were thinking of coming along, now is the time to register! The preliminary schedule is up, papers have been reviewed, everything is going along nicely (touch wood). The third day of the conference is a workshop, with sections on audio and video recording, transcribing and managing … Read more

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’.

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…

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

Recording naturalistic conversation just got even easier

5 February 20115 October 2006 by admin

Here is a technological update to my previous posting on recording conversation.
I consider myself very privileged to be able to visit the Department of Linguistics at UCSB, where I have been lucky enough to audit a number of courses, including Jack Du Bois‘ course on discourse transcription. Today we were introduced to a very nice piece of equipment, the Edirol R-09 ultra-portable flash ram recorder. This piece of equipment is about the same dimensions as an i-pod, although a bit fatter.

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

HCSNet Summer School 2006

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Registration for the Human Communication Sciences Network SummerFest06 (Nov 27th – Dec 1st) opens today. There looks to be an interesting line up of courses. I’m hoping I can head along to the courses on Bayesian Networks and Markov Models and Statistics for Linguistics amongst others. I heard that Trevor Johnston’s course on sign languages … Read more