Endangered Swans

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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.”

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China eight eight oh eight

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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

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“A history of neglect and a neglect of history”

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“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.

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Mobile phone dictionaries

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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.

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Top of the Pops

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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:

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The Growing PARADISEC Collection

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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.

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There’s copying, and there’s research

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This is a follow up to my posting about materials from the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary and my 1993 book Reference Dictionary of Gamilaraay, northern New South Wales being copied without attribution, repackaged and sold in book form.
The ever vigilant David Nash has brought to my attention this wiki which contains Gamilaraay language materials with English glosses, roughly 100 vocabulary items in all. The site is organised into eight subsections:

  • Topics
  • Adverbs
  • Interjections
  • Nouns
  • Particles
  • Verbs
  • Pronouns
  • Suffixes

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Copy, right?

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Today I have a story to share that involves intellectual property violations, taking materials without attribution from a copyrighted dictionary of an Australian indigenous language, and publication of a book that contains such bad scholarship, ridiculous claims, nonsense, and stupid howlers that it is actually funny.
Over the past couple of years I have presented sessions at various workshops and training courses (most recently at a grantee training workshop held at SOAS 11-17th June) on the topics of "ethics, intellectual property rights and copyright". I have learnt a bit about copyright and moral rights in the process – my Powerpoint slides for the most recent presentation can be found here.
One of the issues that is often raised by fieldworkers and researchers during these presentations can be summarised as: "I don’t want to make my data publicly available because someone will steal it and publish it under their own name". I usually reply in terms of the low likelihood of such an event happening (as Andrew Garrett said at an archiving workshop at the January 2008 Linguistic Society of America annual meeting (and I paraphrase): "Sorry to tell you this, but actually no-one wants to steal your data") and the protection afforded by copyright and moral rights (mentioning the World Intellectual Property Organisation and various other lobby groups).
Well, unfortunately, I have to change my tune, folks, because it has happened to me. A subset of materials which I have published in book form (and deposited as Word .doc files with the ASEDA archive) and co-published with David Nathan on the web as the Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Web Dictionary that are all clearly marked as copyright have been reproduced without attribution or recognition of our authorship both on a website and in a recent book publication. Fortunately, they have been done in such as way as to reveal the ignorance of the violator that is truly laughable. Sadly, this individual is attempting to profit financially from both our intellectual property and that of an Australian Aboriginal group, along with potentially damaging the trust we have built up by years of work with the community.
The story goes like this.

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