Endangered Languages and Cultures

Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: a preliminary program

5 February 201110 October 2006 by admin

The preliminary schedule for the conference “Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: from creation to archive and back” is now up. There looks to be some really interesting projects on display. I had a sneak peek at EOPAS, a project to create a workflow and display interlinearised texts, and annodex, a project to display multiple streams … Read more

Ethics and the researcher

5 February 20119 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Behaving in a good way to the people one is working with is vital – unethical researchers do damage to communities in the short-term. And they do incalculable longterm damage, because communities that feel burned by researchers will reject other research proposals which might benefit them. There’s a new publication addressed to Indigenous people on how to deal with health researchers. It’s a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) booklet Keeping research on track: a guide for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples about health research ethics. In the past, the NHMRC guidelines for working with Indigenous people have been taken as models in other disciplines. And so it’s important for us to look at them, even though linguists don’t go sticking needles into people, and a grammar is of less direct benefit than the results of a study of the causes of kidney failure.

Sustainable data from fieldwork: workshop

5 February 20118 October 2006 by admin

RNLD in collaboration with the conference “Sustainable data from fieldwork” is offering a day-long session on the creation, organisation, annotation and display of digital media. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in making digital recordings and annotating them. If you’re new to shoebox or ELAN and have any questions about using it, and you have your own data, then bring along your laptop. The workshop will be held at Sydney University on Wednesday, December 6, 2006.
Read on for the specifics

News: Papuan programme

5 February 20117 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

James McElvenny has put up the preliminary program for the Pearl Beach workshop on Papuan languages. How can you miss “Kalam Rhyming Jingles” “Books, papayas and chicken cries in Bunak”, or the drum rolling finale: Mark Donohue “The end of Papuan”? The workshop runs from the evening of Friday the 27th of October to Sunday … Read more

Mother tongue education: the right to understand what the teacher says

5 February 20116 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Pitjantjatjara people in South Australia are thinking of abandoning their experiment with monolingual English education after fifteen years. At the same time, some communities in the Northern Territory are suffering from dysfunctional schools which happen to be bilingual, and so are thinking of abandoning their bilingual education programs, and the attendant teaching positions for community members. Churn churn. It’s not about whether the program teaches English literacy and numeracy only. It’s about children understanding what is happening in the classroom, and it’s about communities understanding language shift. The evidence is that dropping bilingual education is no magic silver bullet for a miraculous improvement in children’s English language and literacy.
But there’s more evidence that bilingual education can produce better results than monolingual education. In The Australian Anthropological Society Newsletter Number 103, September 2006 (thanks David!) is an article by Ute Eickelkamp On a Positive Note: The Anangu Education Service Conference. Ute describes a conference held in Alice Springs in which half of the more than 200 delegates were Anangu staff and tertiary students “and many discussions and workshops were held in Pitjantjatjara”. Yes!

Recording naturalistic conversation just got even easier

5 February 20115 October 2006 by admin

Here is a technological update to my previous posting on recording conversation.
I consider myself very privileged to be able to visit the Department of Linguistics at UCSB, where I have been lucky enough to audit a number of courses, including Jack Du Bois‘ course on discourse transcription. Today we were introduced to a very nice piece of equipment, the Edirol R-09 ultra-portable flash ram recorder. This piece of equipment is about the same dimensions as an i-pod, although a bit fatter.

Blog-catcher – Aragonese and Fiji

5 February 20114 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Thanks to prowling around the web, we’ve come across Vakaivosavosa, a blog about Fiji and the Pacific, life, history and culture, which has lots of links to material on the Pacific and other blogs. AND – how cool is this.. TLaC’s first citation in a blog about a minority language in that minority language! o … Read more

Tin trunks, gender, wax and emotion

5 February 20112 October 2006 by Jane Simpson

Every dead ethnographer (Indigenous or non-Indigenous) had a tin trunk in which all the information on the people, the language, the culture, anything, yes anything you want to know, could be found. But, I’m sorry, aunty died last week, and we don’t know WHERE that tin trunk is now. (Source of observation: Michael Walsh). The anthropologist Ursula McConnel who worked with Wik Mungkan people on Cape York Peninsula, died in 1957, and people have been looking for her trunk ever since.

Summer school courses in Australian Indigenous languages

5 February 201130 September 2006 by Jane Simpson

Want to learn some Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay in Sydney this January? John Giacon passes on this information. Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative and Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre, in association with the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney, are facilitating Ngaawa-Garay, a summer school which will offer one week courses in Gumbaynggirr and Gamilaraay from Monday 15 – Friday 19 January, 2007.

Congratulations

5 February 201129 September 2006 by admin

Running a bit late on this post, but, congratulations to Stan Grant Senior on being awarded the 2006 Deadly for “Outstanding Acheivement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education”, for his work on Wiradjuri language revival. And of course, congratulations too to all the other recipients!