A workshop entitled Applying Documentary Linguistics will take place in Freiburg, Germany, on 22nd and 23rd November 2013, with SOAS staff among the invited presenters.
The workshop aims to highlight practical aspects of documentary linguistics, including the application of endangered language documentation in other disciplines, and discuss its role in the field of linguistics in general, promoting discussion on the pros and cons of an approach in which language documentation is considered a goal in itself, and not just a methodologically and technologically improved method of data collection for theoretical linguistics and other disciplines. The core question to be explored is: should documentary linguistics simply enhance theoretical research or stand alone as its own applied field?
To promote depth and breadth of discussion, researchers with a variety of opinions and backgrounds as well as creators and users of language documentations from linguistics and other disciplines will participate. The workshop is convened by Michael Rießler and Joshua Wilbur (members of the Freiburg Research Group in Saami Studies, Department for Scandinavian Studies, University of Freiburg). Joshua Wilbur is also an ELAR depositor.
The preliminary programme is:
Friday, 22nd November 2013, Block I: Achieving the Goals of Linguistic Documentation: Past, Present and Future
- Peter Austin (London): “Theory and practice of language documentation – from the 20th to the 21st century”
- Ola Wennstedt (Umeå): “Moving traditional archives into the digital age”
Block II: Technical Interfaces to Documentary Linguistics
- Trond Trosterud (Tromsø): “Computational and documentary linguistics for endangered languages”
- Sabine Stoll (Zurich): “Annotating and analyzing a longitudinal corpus to study the acquisition of an endangered language”
- Daniel Alcón (Freiburg): “Corpus access to primary linguistic data”
Saturday, 23rd November 2013, Block III: Applying Language Documentation in Linguistics and other Disciplines
- Florian Stammler (Rovaniemi): “Documenting oral history of the Soviet Arctic coastal inhabitants: how anthropologists embed life histories as oral texts in wider field contexts”
- Johanna Domokos (Bielefeld): “Investigating literacy genres of orally transmitted indigenous languages”
- Alexandra Lavrillier (Versailles): “Language documentation and applied anthropological research: experience from Evenk nomadic schools”
Block IV: Optimizing language documentation corpora
- Christian Mair (Freiburg): “Development of digital infrastructures and language documentation: Perspectives in CLARIN-D”
- Rolf Kailuweit (Freiburg): “tba”
- David Nathan (London): “Archiving 2.0 and social media”
For more information please contact the conference secretary Silke Trötschel (silke.troetschel -at- frias.uni-freiburg.de).