Fieldwork

Useful and interesting websites and apps about endangered languages: July LIP

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Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of this week’s Melbourne Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne In this month’s LIP and last month’s participants shared in their latest discoveries in the world of apps and online resources. June’s meeting focused on software … Read more

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Things you can do with outputs from language documentation projects: A LIP discussion

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Lauren Gawne recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field.

Our first Melbourne LIP for the year at our regular venue got off to a rocky start when the function room was usurped by the local Touch Football team. Fortunately, we had such an excellent turn out – especially of local honours and PhD students – that we were able to make do in the general area by breaking up into smaller groups to discuss this month’s topic.

Most of the points discussed below are from either the discussion I participated in, and the general summary discussion we had at the end. This means ideas and discussion points may not be attributed to the correct people, but you’re welcome to add clarifying remarks in the comments below.

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PARADISEC’s decade celebration conference

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Announcing the conference “Research, records and responsibility (RRR): Ten years of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)” Dates: 2nd-3rd December 2013 Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia Keynote speaker: Shubha Chaudhuri Associate Director General (Academic) Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology American Institute of Indian Studies Gurgaon, India For details … Read more

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Fieldwork helper – ExSite9

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ExSite9 is an open-source cross-platform tool for creating descriptions of files created during fieldwork. We have been working on the development of ExSite9 over the past year and it is now ready for download and use: http://www.intersect.org.au/exsite9 https://github.com/IntersectAustralia/exsite9/wiki/Install-packages

ExSite9 collects information about files from a directory on your laptop you have selected, and presents it to you onscreen for your annotation, as can be seen in the following screenshot. The top left window shows the filenames, and the righthand window shows metadata characteristics that can be clicked once a file or set of files is selected.The manual is here: http://bit.ly/ExSite9Manual

Researchers who undertake fieldwork, or capture research data away from their desks, can use ExSite9 to support the quick application of descriptive metadata to the digital data they capture. This also enables researchers to prepare a package of metadata and data for backup to a data repository or archive for safekeeping and further manipulation.

Scholars in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) typically need to organise heterogeneous file-based information from a multitude of sources, including digital cameras, video and sound recording equipment, scanned documents, files from transcription and annotation software, spreadsheets and field notes.

The aim of this tool is to facilitate better management and documentation of research data close to the time it is created. An easy to use interface enables researchers to capture metadata that meets their research needs and matches the requirements for repository ingestion.

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Counting Collections

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As will be clear to regular readers of this blog, we are concerned here to encourage the creation of the best possible records of small languages. Since much of this work is done by researchers (linguists, musicologists, anthropologists etc.) within academia, there needs to be a system for recognising collections of such records in themselves as academic output. This question is being discussed more widely in academia and in high-level policy documents as can be seen by the list of references given below.

The increasing importance of language documentation as a paradigm in linguistic research means that many linguists now spend substantial amounts of time preparing corpora of language data for archiving. Scholars would of course like to see appropriate recognition of such effort in various institutional contexts. Preliminary discussions between the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2011 made it clear that, although the ARC accepted that curated corpora could legitimately be seen as research output, it would be the responsibility of the ALS (or the scholarly community more generally) to establish conventions to accord scholarly credibility to such products. Here, we report on some of the activities of the authors in exploring this issue on behalf of the ALS and discuss issues in two areas: (a) what sort of process is appropriate in according some form of validation to corpora as research products, and (b) what are the appropriate criteria against which such validation should be judged?

“Scholars who use these collections are generally appreciative of the effort required to create these online resources and reluctant to criticize, but one senses that these resources will not achieve wider acceptance until they are more rigorously and systematically reviewed.” (Willett, 2004)

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Urban fieldwork: LIP discussion

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Lauren Gawne recaps last night’s Linguistics in the Pub, a monthly informal gathering of linguists in Melbourne to discuss topical areas in our field. The topic for the final Linguistics In the Pub in Melbourne for 2012 was ‘urban fieldwork’, lead by Rosey Billington. Rosey is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne working … Read more

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Researching child language in the field: October LIP

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Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of the last week’sLinguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne A number of linguists in Melbourne have recently begun documenting child language in the field. In the November 2011 LIP we discussed what you need to … Read more

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Crowd-sourcing and Language documentation: September LIP

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Ruth Singer recaps some of the interesting points of the last week’s Linguistics in the Pub, an informal gathering of linguists and language activists that is held monthly in Melbourne The most recent LIP included a demonstration of the Ma! Iwaidja phrasebook and dictionary app developed by the Minjilang Endangered Languages Publication project (publishing as Iwaidja … Read more

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Bursting through Dawes (2)

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Further to my last post, I’ve read on, and my disappointment has only deepened at the treatment of the Sydney Language in Ross Gibson’s 26 views of the starburst world.

Think about the notes you made when you were getting into learning an undocumented language … Imagine they get archived and in a century or two someone looks through them and tries to work out what was going on when you made the notes.  With only shreds of metadata and general knowledge of the historical period to go on, the future reader makes inferences from the content. Could a cluster of words in one of your vocabulary lists point to a hunch you were checking? Or a sequence of illustrative sentences could be the skeletal narrative of a memorable experience shared with your teachers.

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Bursting through Dawes

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‘Aspects of the Sydney Language are a perennial fascination’, as I observed in a 2008 post, and the best record we have of the language is in the two notebooks of Lt William Dawes. Dawes himself has become a fascination and a new book pursues him to imaginary lengths. I have so far only read … Read more

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