Peter Austin has raised his voice on this blog to ‘protect [his] legal rights and those of the Dieri people who have contributed to [his] knowledge of their language’ (source). He suggests that the PanLex project is guilty of ‘theft’ for using, without citation, data from a Dieri-English word list contained in his 1981 grammar … Read more
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post about Professor Phillip M Parker PhD, a Professor of Marketing in France who had established a website called Webster’s Online Dictionary that contained materials on endangered languages taken from copyrighted sources.1 Parker also published a set of books based on materials taken from copyrighted websites, … Read more
Playing media on the web is nothing new. But playing the media that results from fieldwork, having transcripts highlighted to track timecodes in the video or audio, and having it all work without needing to install Flash or other streaming servers, this is new. So is having a path to upload from common fieldwork tools … Read more
All Australian humanities scholars with an interest in digital scholarship should take this brief opportunity to read and comment on the federal government’s ‘2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure’ discussion paper. Why? Because the two previous ‘Roadmaps’ funded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘research infrastructure’, almost exclusively NOT in the Humanities, but … Read more
As I pointed out here and here, speakers of minority and endangered languages are using Web 2.0 social networking applications like Facebook as a means of interacting and communicating. Well , according to wakablogger, it seems Twitter, the short message site, is also being used by these communities as well. The problem is: how to … Read more
Here’s where I spent the morning: HASS On the Hill. One reason I went is because I’d like to know how to get policy-makers and implementers interested in the information that university researchers have on matters like – language education, mother tongue medium instruction… Before it started, I caught up with a Chinese colleague who … Read more
As in previous years (see here, here and here), we will be running a week of activities concerning endangered languages at SOAS this year. Endangered Languages Week 2011 (ELW2011) runs from 9th to 14th May, and includes a host of events: Meet an Endangered Language, each day throughout the week – a series of short … Read more
The ninth volume of Language Documentation and Description is now in production and can be pre-ordered for 20% off the regular price. LDD 9 is a collection of papers dealing with several topics in language documentation: language documentation and sustainability ontologies in language documentation negation, deixis and loan words in endangered languages book reviews The … Read more
As a result of on-going collaboration between the Foundation for Endangered Languages and the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, all thirteen FEL books (proceedings of their unique annual conferences) can now be purchased securely by credit card through the SOAS online bookstore at http://www.bitly.com/LDDstore. (Scroll down past the LDD volumes for the FEL books.) To … Read more
My colleague Stuart McGill and I have recently completed work on a new book Endangered Languages: Criticial Concepts in Linguistics that will be published by Routledge later this year. At 1,600 pages in 4 volumes it is one of the largest projects I have been involved with. The book consists of 75 key journal articles … Read more
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