3 Links for Field Methods
Slides from Claire Bowern, a list of language archives and support for editing Wikipedia
Today’s 3 links are for language documentation field methods:
Claire Bowern’s Language Documentation Lectures
Slide set
A set of powerpoint slides for 8 lectures from Claire Bowen’s 2013 LSA Summer Institute class. These slides include discussion of the general principles of language documentation, hardware and software, collection of elicitation and narratives, grammatical and lexical documentation, and archiving. Can be used, and edited, with attribution.
www.pamanyungan.net/links/language-documentation-lectures/
DELAMAN Open Access archives
Archived data
The Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network has 12 members and five associate members. Some of these archives have collections with open or semi-open access that could be used as the basis of a class-based field methods project. See this article on the ELAR blog from Jonas Lau about using an archival deposit for an MA thesis.
www.delaman.org/members/
Improving language Wikipedia pages with Lingwiki
Wikipedia resources
If you’re teaching students to read and understand descriptive grammars, you can make the assessment task useful for all of humankind and have your students write up their summaries on Wikipedia. Wikimedia have lots of resources for using Wikipedia in education, and you can find more linguistics-specific information in the lingwiki slide set. Detailed Wikipedia summary pages can even be submitted to the peer-reviewed WikiJournal of Humanities (see for an example, the Grammatical Overview of Yolmo).
www.bit.ly/lingwiki
If you want to introduce your students to the social and ethical dimensions of language documentation: The Field Notes podcast from Martha Tsutsui Billins has 12 episodes of interviews with fieldworking linguists, and a new season on the way. Transcripts currently available for the first 8 episodes.
A distraction: For when you can’t decide if you want to be Amy Adams in Arrival, or Bill Labov. (Why not both?)
via Bert Vaux
Language documentation often feels like an endless process of adapting to unexpected circumstances. You can reassure your students this semester that they are certainly getting a chance to navigate contingencies! We’re all doing as well as the situation permits.
See you on Friday for a Resource Guide about Constituency.
Lauren, Gretchen, Liz, and Kate
About Mutual Intelligibility
Mutual Intelligibility is a project to connect linguistics instructors with online resources, especially as so much teaching is shifting quickly online due to current events. It's produced by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch, with the support of our patrons on Lingthusiasm. Our 3 Links editor is Liz McCullough, and our Resource Guide contributor is Kate Whitcomb (Layman's Linguist).
The newsletter consists of 3 Links on a topic on Mondays and Wednesdays and longer Resource Guides on Fridays, both of which are free and will always remain free, but if you have a stable income and find that they’re reducing your stress and saving you time, we're able to fund these because of the Lingthusiasm Patreon and your contributions enable us to fund more guides, more quickly.
Here’s where you can tell us which topics would be useful for you. The more requests we get for a specific topic, the more it helps us prioritize resources that will help the most people.
Here’s where you can send us links (of either things you’ve made or have found useful) for potential inclusion in future newsletters. You can send a single link, or a set of three which may become a 3 Links guest-post! (With credit to you.)
If you have other comments, suggestions, or ideas of ways to help, please email mutual.intellig@gmail.com