Fieldwork – Page 13 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

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

Geo-tagging your photos

5 February 201126 September 2006 by admin

There’s an interesting post on slashdot today, on a product that will geo-tag your photos. Geo-tagging a photo means recording some geographic information at the time you take your photo, typically the longitude and latitude.
At first glance I thought it might be another on of these data-loggers, but actually, with a minor addition, it’s a pretty nifty bit of hardware.

‘How about a cuppa tea?’ On techniques for recording naturalistic conversation.

5 February 201125 September 2006 by admin

This posting is topically aligned with two excellent postings (one by Tom on this blog and one by Claire at Anggarrgoon) about problems relating to video recording and the observer’s paradox. In my comments to Tom’s posting, I talked about some of the problems I’d had recording naturalistic conversation on video and that I’d had more success with straight audio. So I’ll now talk about the audio recording of conversation, which is where I have had more success.

Non-intrusive video taping or spying on your informants?

5 February 201122 September 2006 by admin

(Following a previous post and a reply from Claire at Anggarrgoon)
Is it possible to reduce the intrusiveness of video taping someone?
Before I launch into this… let me just say: “flashing lights and ethical alarm bells!”. What I’m going to talk about is the paradox of fully informing your informants that you’re going film them, and then trying your hardest to seem like you’re not there!

Media Cannibals

5 February 201119 September 2006 by admin

Media watch devoted their entire episode on the 18th of September to analysis of this embarrassing stoush between channel 7 and channel 9. Until next monday, you can view this week’s Media Watch online, the transcripts should be up for a bit longer than that.
Perhaps my only criticism on the Media Watch coverage is that they focused mostly on the content of the fight between the two channels, but didn’t look so much at how ridiculously improbable the scenario was. I guess a follow up on this Paul Raffaele character, and a real discussion of life and hardships of people living in Papua (AIDS springs to mind…amongst many other issues), is content for a real news show rather than a show that critiques the media…
incidentally…I love the title “why 7 ate 9”

i heart my windshield ;)

5 February 201116 September 2006 by Linda Barwick

I’ve just been travelling in northern Australia with postgrad student Isabel Bickerdike recording songs for our Rausing-funded Western Arnhem Land song project. Conditions ranged from windy through very windy right up to very very windy and boy was I glad I’d invested in a Rycote windshield system! Even though the mike was actually blown over … Read more

Permanence and Accountability

5 February 201112 September 2006 by admin

Jane’s last post and a post on the ever excellent Language Log have got me thinking about permanence and accountability in the internet age. Its a theme that I encounter again and again, working for a digital archive.

Transience and permanence on the web

5 February 201111 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

An RSS feed is forever.. that’s what I forgot in the Technorati post (now deleted) – in my desire to avoid Technorati’s quick blog registration (which requires sending a valuable password into the Technorati ether, perhaps forever…). Sorry all! (And boy have we paid for it with streams of junk comments from strip poker sites!).

How do we know what they see? Field linguists and the appearance of things

5 February 201110 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Vivid pink plum trees, white cherry trees, soft masses of yellow wattle, japonica hedges with pink flowers leaping out of new green leaves, white cockatoos browsing on the ground. That was Canberra during the Rematerialising colour conference at ANU’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. How does the outsider linguist find out if speakers of another language have colour terms? This important question for field linguists and lexicographers was raised in two papers on the Australian language Warlpiri by David Nash and Anna Wierzbicka.

PhD scholarships at the University of Sydney

5 February 20119 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

if you want to spend three years thinking and writing about languages and cultures of Australia and the Asia-Pacific region …
Nod to Ethics committee: HEALTH WARNING: and you’re not ESPECIALLY worried about whether you’ll find a interesting job afterwards….
… applications for the 2007 APA/UPA scholarships at the University of Sydney are now open. Information and an application can be downloaded from:
http://www.usyd.edu.au/ro/training/postgraduate_awards.shtml