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.
Fieldwork
Follow‘How about a cuppa tea?’ On techniques for recording naturalistic conversation.
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?
(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
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 ;)
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
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
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
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
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
Plant species, shrub
In the field last year I meticulously gathered photos with audio recordings of many plants in the area I was working in PNG. I certainly don’t like creating lexicon entries all with a gloss of “tree/plant species” and I figured in this digital age, including a picture and audio recording of each plant was one way of increasing the identifiability of each plant (and animal… but they’re not so photogenic). Pictures are a much more salient identifier for speakers of the language than anything else. Never-the-less, scientific name are a good universal identifier for a plant, but they’re hard to get if you don’t have a botanist with you.
So earlier this year I sat down with Barry Conn at the National Herbarium of New South Wales to discuss interdisciplinary work between linguists and botanists. One of my questions was “what does a linguist need to do in the field to get a plant identified?”.
Here are some of my notes from the meeting, with some comments from Barry: