School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 77
-
ItemLD Tools and Methods Summit Report( 2016)This document provides an overview of the main points arising from discussion at the Language Documentation Tools and Methods Summit (http://bit.ly/LDsummit2016) held at the University of Melbourne on 1-3 June 2016 and convened by Nick Thieberger and Simon Musgrave for the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, funded by the Australian Research Council. Invited participants were asked to consider key issues that were pre-circulated and then prepare discussion points for the meeting. Each theme leader took notes and they are summarised below, with links to the original notes also provided below. There is necessarily some overlap between the reports on group discussions.
-
ItemARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language: Indigenous Linguistic & Cultural Heritage Ethics Document(ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, 2017)A significant part of the Centre’s research is reliant on the participation of indigenous communities in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, and actively contributes to the transmission and safeguarding of important cultural, linguistic and historical information. The Centre recognises the right of indigenous communities and individuals to maintain, control, protect and develop their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, and the inherent ownership they have over this intellectual property. The Centre also recognises that communities and individuals within the region hold different views as to what these rights entail. Research conducted by Centre staff and students at the collaborating institutions is subject to approval by the respective institutional human research ethics committees. These statutory committees review and approve research involving Indigenous people with specific reference to Values and Ethics: Guidelines for Ethical Conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Research (NHMRC 2003), and AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (AIATSIS 2021), plus the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research (NHMRC, ARC, AVCC 2007) and ask researchers to consider expectations in Keeping Research on Track (NHMRC 2006). However, the CoE acknowledges that simply adhering to institutional requirements does not entail an ethical outcome, and we endorse the NHMRC’s statement that it “is possible for researchers to ‘meet’ rule-based requirements without engaging fully with the implications of difference and values relevant to their research. The approach advanced in these guidelines is more demanding of researchers as it seeks to move from compliance to trust.” (NHMRC 2003: 4)
-
ItemIt's a word isn't it? Language affection as an outcome of language programmes.(School of Languages and Linguistics, 2000)Structural linguistics has a particular view of the integrity of language which may be detrimental to the construction of appropriate language maintenance programmes for small indigenous languages. In this paper I outline ways in which ‘affective’ use of language may be the most useful target of language programmes in some situations, based on my experience with Australian indigenous languages. Fluency in a language may not be the achievable outcome of a language course for a number of reasons, not least among them being the enormity of the task perceived by learners of the language. For languages with few or no speakers we should be able to construct language programmes in which the use of a small number of terms in the target language, for purposes of identity, is a sufficient and realistic outcome.
-
ItemThe Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA)(De Gruyter, 1995)
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableCarl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present(ANU Press, 2017-09-21)Interned as a prisoner of war in Australia in the 1940s, the Hittite specialist Carl Georg von Brandenstein went on to work with speakers of a number of Australian languages in Western Australia. At a time when the dominant paradigms in linguistics were either Chomskyan reductionism or writing a grammar to the exclusion of textual material, Carl followed his own direction, producing substantial collections of texts and recordings in Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Nyiyaparli, Ngadju and Noongar, as well as information about a number of other Australian languages. Part of his motivation was to obtain examples to reconstruct what he considered to be the original human language that diffused to all corners of the world, so he put some effort into comparing Australian languages with the classical languages he had previously studied.
-
ItemBuilding Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)(ISCA, 2018)Machine learning has revolutionized speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of ELPIS, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. ELPIS puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.
-
ItemMultilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages(Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
-
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.
-
ItemLD&C possibilities for the next decade(University of Hawaii Press, 2017)
-
ItemWorking Together in Vanuatu: Research Histories, Collaborations, Projects and Reflections(ANU Press, 2011-10-01)This collection is derived from a conference held at the Vanuatu National Museum and Cultural Centre (VCC) that brought together a large gathering of foreign and indigenous researchers to discuss diverse perspectives relating to the unique program of social, political and historical research and management that has been fostered in that island nation. While not diminishing the importance of individual or sole-authored methodologies, project-centered collaborative approaches have today become a defining characteristic of Vanuatu’s unique research environment. As this volume attests, this environment has included a dynamically wide range of both ni-Vanuatu and foreign researchers and related research perspectives, most centrally including archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists, historians, legal studies scholars and development practitioners. This emphasis on collaboration has emerged from an ongoing awareness across Vanuatu’s research community of the need for trained researchers to engage directly with pressing social and ethical concerns, and out of the proven fact that it is not just from the outcomes of research that communities or individuals may be empowered, but also through their modes and processes of implementation, as through the ongoing strength and value of the relationships they produce. With this in mind, the papers presented here go beyond the mere celebration of collaboration by demonstrating Vanuatu’s specific environment of cross-cultural research as a diffuse set of historically emergent methodological approaches, and by showing how these work in actual practice.