School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Hypothetically Speaking: Ethics in linguistic fieldwork, a provocation
    MUSGRAVE, S ; Thieberger, N ; Derhemi, E ; Moseley, C (Routledge, 2023-03-06)
    Ethical issues are not always easily resolved. In the case of language documentation work, such issues require careful thought to ensure that all parties to a research process are informed and are able to participate equally, or to the level that they want, in the research process. While there is a considerable literature on ethics and fieldwork, here we present some of the issues in the form of an entertaining hypothetical discussion, presented as part of the social program at a conference of the Australian Linguistic Society with a cast who were given an outline of their roles, but not the scenarios that they would have to address in the course of the event. At the request of cast members, and in keeping with the topic, we did not record the presentation, but do offer the script here in the hope that it provides a less didactic coverage of some ethical issues than may be found elsewhere. We are pleased to be able to offer this chapter in celebration of Nick Ostler’s career and of his support for many language projects around the world. We hope this chapter’s entertainment can live up to Nick’s entertaining conversation in conference presentations and dinners.
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    Community-Led Documentation of Nafsan (Erakor, Vanuatu)
    Krajinovic, A ; Billington, R ; Emil, L ; Kaltapau, G ; Thieberger, N ; Vetulani, Z ; Paroubek, P ; Kubis, M (SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG, 2022)
    We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain documentation of Nafsan, the local indigenous language. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data, and give an overview of the outcomes of a community-led documentation after initial training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of project from the perspective of the community researchers and the external linguists. We show that community-led documentation such as this project in Erakor, in which data management and archiving are incorporated into the documentation process, has crucial benefits for both the community and the linguists. The two most salient benefits are: a) long-term documentation of linguistic and cultural practices calibrated towards community’s needs, and b) collection of larger quantities of data by community members, and often of better quality and scope than those collected by visiting linguists, which, besides being readily available for research, have a great potential for training and testing emerging language technologies for less-resourced languages, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
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    Carl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present
    Thieberger, N ; Peterson, N ; Kenny, A (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.
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    Keeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
    Thieberger, N ; Barwick, L ; Evans, N ; Klamer, M (University of Hawaii Press, 2012)
    At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Association of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.
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    Walking to Erro: Stories of travel, origins, or affection
    THIEBERGER, N ; Francois, A ; Lacrampe, S ; Franjieh, M ; Schnell, S (Asia-Pacific Linguistics, 2015)
    In this chapter I discuss several stories, mostly recorded at Erakor village in Vanuatu, which have as a theme the relationship between the islands of Erromango and Efate in Vanuatu. They reinforce the observation that the water between islands is a pathway rather than an obstruction to communication, recalling the notion of the Pacific as an interconnected ‘Sea of Islands’ in Hau’ofa’s (2008) terms. Together with this perceived connection between these two islands, linguistic features shared between Erromango and South Efate could be an indication of contact sufficient to lead to innovations in South Efate not found in neighbouring languages to the north. Lynch (2000a:337) concludes that the nature of the relationship between South Efate and its neighbours to the south requires further detailed research and this chapter is offered as a step toward understanding the type of contact there was between Erromango and Efate. I will also be concerned to show that the traditional stories on which this chapter is based are still part of Erakor life, in contrast to our expectation from the literature or from the fact that Erakor is the closest village to the capital city of Vanuatu, Port Vila.
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    Daisy Bates in the digital world
    Thieberger, N ; Austin, PK ; Koch, H ; Simpson, J (EL Publishing, 2016)
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    Research Methods in Recording Oral Tradition: Choosing Between the Evanescence of the Digital or the Senescence of the Analog
    Thieberger, N ; levenberg, L ; Neilson, T ; Rheams, D (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
    In this chapter I present methods for creating proper research data so that it can be archived and re-used in future, with a focus on linguistic fieldwork, but with principles that apply across a range of humanities disciplines. Our research group in Australia set up a project to preserve records in the world’s small languages, this is the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC.org.au). As the collection grows in size (currently 45TB) and number of languages represented (currently just over 1,170) we have to seriously consider the longterm viability of the collection. But the most urgent issue that faces us is to locate and digitise recordings that will not otherwise be preserved. We have also paid considerable attention to training new researchers so that they think about the quality of the records they produce, including the content, filenaming, formats, metadata, and equipment they use. Our particular focus is on records of small languages, those for which there are few records available and so the work of a linguist recording speakers of the language becomes all the more important. Keep in mind that there are over 7,000 languages in the world and that for most of them there are few, if any, records. Thus, the work of making recordings in the course of linguistic fieldwork becomes a critical point at which not only can scholarly work be done, but the basic records of performance in another of the world’s cultures can be created. Further, the value of the records (both to the speakers and their descendants and to linguistic research) increases as the number of speakers decreases – the fewer speakers, the more valuable the records – pointing to the responsibility for linguists who create these records to manage them properly.
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    Tools and technology for language documentation
    Rice, K ; Thieberger, N ; Campbell, L ; Rehg, K (Oxford University Press, 2018)
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    Language Documentation
    Thieberger, N ; Sato, H ; Bradshaw, J (Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i, 2016)
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    Unable to say too much about kano in Nafsan (South Efate)
    Thieberger, N ; Matthewson, L ; Massam, D ; Quinn, H (Victoria University of Wellington, 2017)