With the upgrade to a new catalogue system just around the corner, PARADISEC staff are busily fine-tuning metadata within existing collections whilst attending to business as usual and accessioning recordings and documents representing a wide range of languages. Take a glimpse of our latest additions and the regions they originate from below to get a … Read more
At the Aboriginal Languages Workshop at North Stradbroke Island last month, as usual there were things to celebrate. I had the honour of helping launch the Kaytetye Dictionary*. Book launches are a lovely way of thinking about and celebrating people’s work and ideas. Here’s what I said, more or less. Things I love about this … Read more
Back in the old days when some of us were younger and starting out on our language documentation and description careers (for me in 1972, as described in this blog post) the world was pretty much analogue and we didn’t have digital hardware or software to think about. Back then recordings were made with reel-to-reel … Read more
PARADISEC now holds 177 collections containing 7,516 items and 59,083 files that are 5.59 TB in size. There are 3,310 hours of audio recordings in the collection. The catalog of these collections can be viewed via the Australian National Data Service, or the Open Language Archives Community or the Virtual Language Observatory. Since our last … Read more
This year at PARADISEC our collections grew as follows: January 2011 / December 2011 159/172 collections 6,972 /7,422 items 46,900 /58,680 files 5.02 /5.46 TB 2880:25/3185:43 hours We are always in negotiation with prospective depositors about collections, for example, we are working with Theodore Schwartz to accession his wonderful 1950s Manus (PNG) recordings (made with … Read more
Over the past 10 years or so it has become increasingly common for researchers working on endangered languages to deposit their recordings and analysis (transcriptions, translations, annotations, dictionaries, grammars etc.) in a language archive1 In fact, in Himmelmann’s manifesto on language documentation (HImmelmann 1998, 2002, see also Himmelmann 2006) and Woodbury’s seminal articles (Woodbury 2003, … Read more
At this year’s American Anthropological Association (AAA)
Last month I wrote a blog post about quantification in language documentation and “[h]ow much of the corpus needs to be linguistically annotated so that ‘later researchers will be able to reconstruct the (grammar of the) language’ or indeed so that the rest of the corpus can be parsed”. Note that I was talking about … Read more
Forty-five years ago the annual fieldwork reports of some of the researchers funded by the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS) included specifications of how much research had been completed in terms of the number of feet of tapes that had been recorded during the project year (“this year was especially productive with … Read more
Doing Great Things with Small Languages is an ARC funded project run by Nick Thieberger and Rachel Nordlinger at the University of Melbourne. Linguists routinely record minority endangered languages for which no prior documentation exists. This is vitally important work which often records language structures and knowledge of the culture and physical environment that would … Read more
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