field linguistics

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.

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/

It is our pleasure to announce the launch of the L&C Field Manuals and Stimulus Materials, a web resource providing access to many of the field manuals produced by the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

The NSF Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) released last week a Dear Colleague Letter inviting members of the research community (individuals and groups) to submit by September 30th, 2,000-word-maximum white papers outlining what they think are "grand challenge" questions in the fields supported by SBE "that are both foundational and transformative". These contributions will be used to help the Directorate make plans to support research over the coming decade and beyond.