language documentation

New book on language variation infrastructure

Submitted by Janne Bondi Johan... on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 13:34

Dear colleagues,

You may want to learn about the book "Language Variation Infrastructure. Papers on selected projects" (2011) based on some talks from Workshop on research infrastructure for linguistic variation (RiLiVS) arranged at the University of Oslo. I think most of you will find the papers interesting.

The book is freely downloadable from the web site of the OSLA Oslo Studies in Language:
https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/osla/issue/view/6
You can choose to download the whole book or just individual chapters.

This is the list of contents:

RELISH-Symposium „Rendering Endangered Lexicons Interoperable through Standards Harmonization”, Frankfurt, October 10, 2011 “RELISH meets LOEWE”

Submitted by Irina Nevskaya on Tue, 08/16/2011 - 10:31

The RELISH project promotes language-oriented research by addressing a two-pronged problem: (1) the lack of harmonization between digital standards for lexical information in Europe and America, and (2) the lack of interoperability among existing lexicons of endangered languages, in particular those created with the Shoebox lexicon building software. The cooperation partners in the RELISH project are the University of Frankfurt (FRA), the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI), and Eastern Michigan University, the host of the Linguist List (ILIT).

NSF announces new Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) solicitation

Submitted by D Terence Langendoen on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 18:10

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has just announced a new Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) solicitation at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11554/nsf11554.pdf, with a deadline of 20 Sept 2011 for proposals (note: not 15 Sept as in past years). Projects must focus on one or more of the following areas:

"Linked Data in Linguistics" at DGfS 2012

Submitted by Sebastian Nordhoff on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 03:50

Linked Data in Linguistics
Linguists from all disciplines produce more and more data and share the challenge how to make this data accessible to other researchers in their field and beyond. This does not only concern the general availability of data, but also the representation of the structure of the data. Linked Data is one paradigm which can be employed to tackle this task.
We are happy to announce the workshop "Linked Data in Linguistics" at the annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft, DGfS) taking place March 7-9, 2012 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

“Open and shut: Digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge”

Submitted by Sharon Hargus on Tue, 04/26/2011 - 14:14

Kimberly (“Kim”) Christer (Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies, Washington State University), an anthropologist by training, presented “Open and shut: Digital repatriation and the circulation of indigenous knowledge” on 4-14-11 at the University of Washington, Seattle campus. With the support of NEH, she is working on the development of the “Mukurtu software tool” (http://www.mukurtuarchive.org/documentation.html), a user-customizable tool for the creation of archives.

Data provenance and data aggregation

Submitted by Jeff Good on Mon, 04/25/2011 - 18:34

Peter Austin, over at Endangered Languages and Cultures, has initiated a discussion on citation practices (with James McElvenny also participating), and it was prompted (at least partly) by some data I have had a role in processing as part of the LEGO project.

Digital repatriation

Submitted by Emily M. Bender on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 20:07

Tomorrow Kimberly Christen (WSU) will give a talk at the University of Washington on the Mukurtu Indigenous Archive Tool and repatriation of indigenous knowledge in digital form.

Abstract, from the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities calendar:

Interdisciplinary Centre for Social and Language Documentation in Portugal

Submitted by Peter Bouda on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 08:12

The Centro Interdisciplinar de Documentação Linguística e Social (CIDLeS) is an interdisciplinary non-profit centre dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the linguistic (and cultural) heritage in Europe. It was founded in January 2010 as a result of the work of a number of researchers at the Institute of General Linguistics and Language Typology at the University of Munich and at the Department of Portuguese Studies at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics

Submitted by Jeff Good on Tue, 04/05/2011 - 10:04

I just saw an announcement for this conference:

Language Documentation Meets Corpus Linguistics: How to Exploit DOBES Corpora for Descriptive Linguistics and Language Typology?

2011 LSA Orthography Symposium

Submitted by Emily M. Bender on Tue, 01/25/2011 - 13:59

The 85th Annual Meeting of the LSA (Pittsburgh, 2011) included a symposium on creating orthographies for unwritten languages. Creating an orthography has important implications for both speaker community access and long-term preservation and access to linguistic data. The organizers of the symposium have made the materials (abstracts, handouts, and slides) available here: http://www.sil.org/linguistics/2011LSASymposium/