language documentation

Data provenance and data aggregation

Submitted by jcgood 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 ebender 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 pbouda 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 jcgood 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 ebender 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/

Copyright free language descriptions

Submitted by cysouw on Thu, 11/18/2010 - 07:53

Dear colleagues,

the Language Description Heritage project is slowly picking up steam and getting more and more content to be publicly available under a permissive license. Please check the announcement blog to see our current list of available works:

http://ldh.livingsources.org/archive/

We are currently going through out-of-copyright works from before 1935. If you happen to have any digital version of any such work lying around (and it is not yet available in the above-mentioned archive), then we would be happy to check the copyright, and make it available in the project.

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS

Submitted by djnathan on Sat, 09/11/2010 - 10:48

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS preserves and disseminates digital documentation of endangered languages around the world, especially (but not limited to) the outcomes of ELDP-funded projects. ELAR's recently re-launched website is designed specifically to suit the needs of endangered languages archiving, using "Web 2.0" methods to implement a nuanced access control system and make the site user-friendly for a range of audiences.

Abney & Bird's Grand Challenge: The Human Language Project

Submitted by ebender on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 22:24

Steven Abney and Steven Bird published a provocative paper (.pdf) at ACL 2010 calling on the computational linguistics community to work to create a "Universal Corpus", an undertaking that they compare in both scale and potential impact to the Human Genome Project. Here is the abstract:

Invitation from NSF/SBE for white papers describing grand challenges

Submitted by terry on Sun, 08/15/2010 - 19:22

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.

Conference on Electronic Grammaticography—Location Change

Submitted by jcgood on Sun, 08/15/2010 - 11:40

The location for the Conference on Electronic Grammaticography, previously announced on this blog, has been moved to the University of Hawaii so that it can be held under the umbrella of the 2nd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation.

Abstracts are due on 31 August 2010.