School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Computers in Field Linguistics

Thieberger, N (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.