School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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As we may link: time-aligned concordances of field recordings. A working model

Thieberger, N ( 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.