I’ve been feeling the need for an Australian corpus for a long time – do people really speak the way I so confidently say to our students that they do? Maybe not…
Anyway at the last Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) conference, there was a meeting on establishing the Australian National Corpus initiative. As a result, they’re planning an HCSNet Workshop on Designing the Australian National Corpus to be held in Sydney (4-5 December 2008), as well as getting the National Audit of Language Data in Australia rolling. The call for papers for this workshop will be distributed very soon.
If you want to add your name to their statement of common purpose (attached below) and be on the mailing list, contact Michael Haugh [m.haugh (AT griffith.edu.au)] or Cliff Goddard [cgoddard (AT une.edu.au)]
FollowE-research and language documentation, a natural fit – Nick Thieberger
[From our man in Hawai’i and Melbourne – Nick Thieberger]
The Australian government has millions of dollars that it will be spending on what it calls the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support new technologies in research in Australia.
“Through NCRIS, the Government is providing $542 million over 2005-2011 to provide researchers with major research facilities, supporting infrastructure and networks necessary for world-class research.”
DEST released a paper outlining what it called ‘capabilities’ which it proposed to fund, and they were ALL in the sciences, including lots of shiny pointy instruments (synchrotron, new telescopes and so on) to do the whizzbang experiments that are so popular and capture the imagination of politicians. While the physical science community has amazing capacity to pull in big research dollars, there are not that many of them, and even fewer who actually want to use each of these very expensive instruments.
On the other hand, the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) community is huge, and also does the kind of work that, in the main, is immediately relevant to those who fund it (taxpayers). So, in the consultation that followed, the clamour of HASS proponents resulted in a new ‘capability’ being added to the ‘roadmap’, but without any funding (yet) associated with it. There will be an ‘Innovation White Paper’ announcement before the end of 2008, and the current roadmap leads to the White Paper.
All of this is important for us, as it is the bucket from which national infrastructure like a National Data Service may be funded, and where policies on standards for data repositories like PARADISEC will be set. It is where funding will come from for the national computer facility that houses the online version of the PARADISEC collection.
Ethics and the linguist
I could whinge for hours & hours & hours about the time&labour-wasting process of getting ethics clearance for – wait for it – the dangerous act of giving students questionnaires about everyday language use on everyday subjects. You have better things to read. Among which could be the Linguistics Society of America’s draft statement on … Read more
Endangered Swans
I took a couple of weeks off recently for my summer holidays during which I started reading an “airport book” (picked up at W.H. Smith’s in the new Heathrow Terminal 5 under one of those ubiquitous “buy one get one half price” deals also offered by Waterstones, Blackwells and Borders throughout the UK — even my local Tesco supermarket offers 50% discount on trade paperbacks). It is called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Penguin Books, 2007), and what attracted me to shell out my 6 pounds (sorry, readers in Australia) was the subtitle The Impact of the Highly Improbable and the blurb:
“This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge: they’re nearly impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalise them.”
China eight eight oh eight
Loved the fireworks. Loved history on and through paper. Loved the moving movable type. Loved the delighted athletes of the world. Loathed the goose-stepping soldiers. Loathed the mass synchronised movements. Loathed the rhythmic grunts. Bit worried about the cute young people in ethnic minority dress. Hope that unity doesn’t mean homogeneity. Hope that harmony comes … Read more
“A history of neglect and a neglect of history”
“A history of neglect and a neglect of history” was Nick Evans’ summary of some gaps in work on Indigenous languages in Australia on Friday, as he launched a new collection of papers Encountering Aboriginal Languages: Studies in the history of Australian linguistics, edited by William B. McGregor. Gaps that we authors hope we’ve shoved fingers into…
Nick listed several reasons for linguists being concerned about the history of linguistics, most of which were demonstrated by papers in the workshop that preceded the launch, the Inaugural Conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific (SHLP), held at the Australian National University on Friday August 1.
Ngapartji Ngapartji press release on Australian Indigenous languages
Ngapartji Ngapartji has launched a policy paper regarding Australian Indigenous languages. You can download it [.pdf] from their website. The press release is below.
Mobile phone dictionaries
I am down in Adelaide at the moment delivering the Kaurna electronic dictionaries we’ve been working on to the Kaurna Warra Pintyandi group. We’ve produced a Kirrkirr Kaurna dictionary and a mobile phone Kaurna dictionary, based on the work of the 19th century German missionaries Christian Teichelmann and Clamor Schürmann. Both dictionaries were well received. The mobile phone dictionary seemed to be particularly well received by the young people, but I guess we can really appreciate these things. I’ve put up a demonstration version of the dictionary for download so that a wider audience can try it out. I’ve also put up information about how the dictionary works and provided the source code and instructions on how to port other dictionaries into the program.
Top of the Pops
The Books section of the website of The Guardian newspaper here in the UK has a feature they call Top 10s. These are lists prepared by a prominent author featuring their pick of the top 10 items within a topic area, one usually connected to the publication of one of their books. There are the kinds of lists you might expect, like Sarah Anderson’s Top 10 books about wilderness, or Alison MacLeod’s top 10 short stories. But there are also cute ones like Simon Critchley’s top 10 philosophers’ deaths (would linguists’ deaths be quite so interesting?).
In connection with the recent publication of the book I edited called 1000 Languages, The Guardian asked me to prepare a Top 10 endangered languages list. “Great”, I thought, “given my interest in communicating about our work, here’s a way to reach thousands of Guardian readers and others and get them interested in what we do as linguists, as well as highlight some issues about endangered languages. But how do you pick 10 languages out of a potential list of 3,000 (or over 6,000 if Michael Krauss is to be believed?)”
It was an impossible task, so I figured I’d set some parameters and see what I came up with. I decided on the following rules of thumb:
The Growing PARADISEC Collection
Following on from Aidan’s blog last week announcing that PARADISEC‘s archive has reached 2000 hours of recordings, here is some of the detail about what’s in our digital archive. Along with Mark Durie’s collection from Aceh, described in the last post, are other collections from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, the Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kiribati, Korea, Lao, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Reunion, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam, and Wallis and Futuna.