School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemKaipuleohone, The University of Hawai'i's Digital Ethnographic Archive(University of Hawaii Press, 2009)The University of Hawai‘i’s Kaipuleohone Digital Ethnographic Archive was created in 2008 as part of the ongoing language documentation initiative of the Department of Linguistics. The archive is a repository for linguistic and ethnographic data gathered by linguists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and others. Over the past year, the archive has grown from idea to reality, due to the hard work of faculty and students, as well as support from inside and outside the Department. This paper will outline the context for digital archiving and provide an overview of the development of Kaipuleohone, examining both concrete and theoretical issues that have been addressed along the way. The creation of the archive has not been problem-free and the archive itself is an ongoing process rather than a finished product. We hope that this paper will be useful to scholars and language workers in other areas who are considering setting up their own digital archive.
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ItemComputers in Field Linguistics(Elsevier, 2006)Computers have been associated with field linguistics from their earliest days, as witness the enthusiasm with which computers were embraced by linguists, from mainframe computers in the 1960s to personal computers in the 1980s. While initially it was common to force our efforts into the framework provided by particular software, we are now more aware of the need to see the data itself as the primary concern of the analyst and not the software that we use to manipulate the data. Inasmuch as it allows us to carry out the main functions desired by a field linguist, software is a tool through which our data passes, the data becoming transformed in some way, but surviving the journey sufficiently to live on, independent of any software, into the future.
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ItemEOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text(University of Sydney, 2006)One of the goals of the Australian Research Council-funded E-research project called Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks, or simply EthnoER, is to take outputs of normal linguistic analytical processes and present them online in a system we have called the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system, or EOPAS. EthnoER has twenty-three chief investigators from ten organisations, both Australian and international, at Universities and other agencies, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), language centres and language archives. The project includes a set of testbed projects with varying requirements for online annotation and presentation of data. We aim to provide online mechanisms for annotating data in order that, for example, archival media files can be annotated by experts with local knowledge and that samples of that media, perhaps a three minute chunk, can be presented so that users can get a sense of the quality of the recording and other information that may influence their decision to download the whole file.
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ItemDocumentation in practice: developing a linked media corpus of South Efate(Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2004)There is a growing need for linguists working with endangered languages to be able to provide documentation of those languages that will serve two functions, not only the analysis and presentation of examples and texts, but also the means for accessing the material in the future. In this paper I describe a workflow for building documentation into a language description developed in the course of writing a grammar of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu, for a PhD dissertation. I suggest that, with appropriate tools, the effort of recording and transcribing documentary field recordings can result in a media corpus from which we can produce instant links between text and media, which in turn enriches our analysis. Further, these annotations are in an ideal form for archiving and for providing access to data by the speakers of the language. I take it as axiomatic that we must archive our recordings and associated material and that this step is integral to the larger project of language documentation.
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ItemALS Hypothetical( 2005-09)A hypothetical scenario prepared by Simon Musgrave and Nick Thieberger and the presentation was by John Henderson (who added his own flourishes).This scenario draws out some significant ethical issues facing linguists, in particular those arising from the use of recording media and, increasingly, from more in depth studies of small, so-called ‘endangered’ languages in use in various contexts. The scenario is a background against which the panel can discuss the issues in character, and it should be made clear to the audience the characters do not reflect on the real-life panel members except in occasional asides, and that any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is inevitable.
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ItemLanguage is like a carpet: Carl-Georg von Brandenstein and Australian languages(Pacific Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Stu, 2008)Born in 1909 in Hannover, Germany, Carl Georg Christoph Freiherr von Brandenstein (Carl) entered the Australian linguistic scene in the 1960s with recordings and analysis of languages of Western Australia, mainly from the Pilbara. Over the next thirty years he also recorded information about Ngadjumaya from the south-east of WA and Noongar in the south-west. His idiosyncratic style didn’t help his reputation in a linguistic scene which became increasingly monocultural in its approach during his research career. He was never part of the mainstream of linguistics in Australia, but followed his own path, and has left a legacy of records of languages for which little else is known. He was always generous in providing material when requested, as much to champion his theories as to engage in academic openness. This chapter discusses Carl’s contribution and the period of Australian linguistics in which he worked.
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ItemState of Indigenous languages in Australia - 2001, Australia State of the Environment Second Technical Paper Series (Natural and Cultural Heritage), Department of the Environment and Heritage, Canberra( 2001)This paper provides data for, or information about, nine environmental indicators related to the condition of Indigenous languages in Australia, being a contribution towards the 2001 national State of the Environment Report. The indicators address the following key issues about the state of Indigenous languages in Australia: * condition of Indigenous languages, * state of documentation of languages, * the wider use of Indigenous languages, * funding, research and education.The study found that in 1996: * there has been a decrease in the percentage of Indigenous people speaking Indigenous languages from 100% in 1800 to 13% in 1996, * there are about 55,000 speakers of Indigenous languages in Australia, * the number of Indigenous languages, and the percentage of people speaking these languages have continued to fall in the period 1986-1996, accelerating over the ten years, and * of the 20 languages categorised in 1990 as 'strong', 3 should now be regarded as 'endangered'.The paper comments on the usefulness of the indicators and makes recommendations to improve either the indicators or the source data collections.
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ItemBuilding an interactive corpus of field recordings(Paris: ELRA, 2004)There is a growing need for linguists working with small and endangered languages to be able to provide documentation of those languages that will serve two functions, not only the analysis and presentation of examples and texts, but also the means for others to access the material in the future. In this presentation I describe the workflow developed in the course of writing a description of South Efate, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu for a PhD dissertation. This workflow steps through (i) field recording; (ii) digitising or capturing media data as citable objects for archival purposes; (iii) transcribing those objects with time-alignment; (iv) establishing a media corpus indexed by the transcript; (v) instantiating links between text and media using a purpose-built tool (Audiamus); (vi) exporting from Audiamus to interlinearise while maintaining timecodes; (vii) extracting citable example sentences for use in a grammatical description; (viii) exporting from Audiamus in XML, Quicktime or other formats.
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ItemLanguage data assessment at the national level: learning from the State of the Environment process in Australia(Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2003)Language maintenance is necessarily grounded in communities and has a local focus. Federal government policy has a national and international focus, yet it is the source of funding for most Australian indigenous language (IL) work, through ATSIC. The nearest approach to a national assessment of the number of languages and their needs has come through a perhaps unexpected source, an initiative of the federal department responsible for the environment, Environment Australia. Every five years this department mounts an evaluation of aspects of the physical and cultural environment, called the 'State of the Environment'. In 1997 it proposed a set of indicators for assessing the state of indigenous languages and in 2001 these indicators were implemented in the State of Indigenous Languages (SOIL) report. Among the indicators are those which measure the level of endangerment of languages. This necessitated building an improved listing of languages and consideration of how census data can be used to extract endangerment measures. Especially given the minimal questions on language in the Australian census and issues surrounding the meaning of the responses, these measures benefit from cross-checking against local studies where they exist. This paper presents some of the most recently available census data from 2001 and compares it, where possible, with local and regional studies.
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ItemAs we may link: time-aligned concordances of field recordings. A working model( 2001)One can now picture a future investigator in his laboratory. His hands are free, and he is not anchored. As he moves about and observes, he photographs and comments. Time is automatically recorded to tie the two records together. If he goes into the field, he may be connected by radio to his recorder. As he ponders over his notes in the evening, he again talks his comments into the record. Vannevar Bush (1945) It has taken some time, but we are now able to create a system like the one envisaged by Vannevar Bush over 50 years ago. And despite the obvious leaps and bounds in technologies there are still areas in which much needs to be done. Linguists working on small languages (those typically spoken by indigenous people) with limited research grants typically patch together tools that will do what we want. Our research involves recording stories, sentences and so on, and then analysing that material to write a grammatical description. What we have done is record on to cassette, then transcribe the cassette and store it safely somewhere (like in our garage, or a cupboard). However a growing awareness that the products of our work need to be preserved in perpetuity means that we are also actively seeking principled approaches to language documentation.