INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON LANGUAGE PRESERVATION Techniques and Technologies for Documenting the Languages of Papua New Guinea 21 May - 1 June, 2012 University of Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea The University of Goroka is at the forefront of efforts to preserve the endangered languages of Papua New Guinea, thanks to new initiatives in curriculum development, technology training, and digital archiving. Goroka is situated in an area of exceptional linguistic diversity, including dozens of undocumented languages. This workshop – the first of its kind in PNG – will provide hands-on training in digital technologies for language documentation, and will create archival documentation for at least five local languages for which speakers will be available. Topics to be covered include: audio and video recording techniques, documenting informed consent, metadata and record keeping, the protocol of Basic Oral Language Documentation, and key software tools for transcription, interlinear text preparation, and dictionary making. Each participant will be assigned to a team who will compile a substantial electronic text collection for one of the languages. People interested in participating should email Steven Bird ([email protected]) or the local organizers ([email protected], [email protected]) for further information. The workshop is sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, the Australian Research Council, and the University of Goroka. Program
Documentation ActivitiesThe first three days are paper-based: we will prepare written texts, and then gloss and translate them. On the Thursday we expand the scope to include recording original sources and online curation using FLEx (activities which are respectively upstream and downstream of the paper-based work). In the second week we continue these three activities in parallel, aiming to generate as much written language documentation as possible. Mon 21 afternoon: language teams formed, members to write a short text, discuss spelling issues, read aloud to group without translation (original texts to be written double space, left page of exercise book only) Tue 22 morning: word-level glossing of existing texts and phrasal translation (on facing page), afternoon: compilation of initial lexicon Wed 23 morning: expanding the lexicon Thu 24 morning: teams send 1-2 members to enter the materials into FLEx while the rest prepare more glossed texts, afternoon: FLEx work continues to the point where draft texts and lexicons are printed, remaining members learn audio and video recording methods Fri 25 morning: expanding lexicons with kinship terms, afternoon: multitasking -- recording, transcription, FLEx (recording work is now completed) Mon 28 - Thu 31: reviewing the glosses and translations, translation of a Wikipedia article into the tokples, discussion of translation issues, transcription of recordings, text entry and lexicon curation with FLEx. Presenters University of Hawaii at Manoa Dr Andrea Berez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, where she primarily teaches language documentation. Since 2004 she has been working to document and preserve indigenous languages in Alaska, and she is now beginning to work on documenting languages of PNG as well. For the past year she has been working with speakers of Kuman who live in Hawai‘i and plans to continue this work here in PNG. Dr Berez is also dedicated to making language archiving accessible to members of speaker communities.  Dr Steven Bird University of Melbourne & University of Pennsylvania  University of California, Santa Barbara  Dr David Chiang University of Southern California David Chiang is Research Assistant Professor at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. His research is in natural language processing, the subfield of computer science that aims to enable computers to understand and produce human language. He focuses mainly on language translation, and is interested in syntactic parsing and other areas as well.  University of California at Santa Barbara Don is a PhD student in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His main interests include historical linguistics, fieldwork, and documentation. His research focuses on the Sogeram language family, spoken in central Madang Province.  Mark Eby University of Goroka Mark Eby is a lecturer in media and literature at the University of Goroka. He has an MA from UCLA. He has been working as an independent filmmaker for over 15 years and is currently mentoring young people on their media projects. He has written, directed and produced documentaries and promotional videos that explore the visual and performing arts, urban history, disaster relief, special programs for disadvantage youths, HIV/AIDS awareness, technological advances in environmentally friendly transportation, and the effect of globalization on indigenous cultures. He grew up in the Wahgi Valley of Papua New Guinea and has lived and worked alternately in the U.S. or in Papua New Guinea throughout his life.  University of Goroka Friedel Frowein is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Goroka. He did his MA at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal in Germany in 2007. For his thesis, he developed a computer program that extracts verbs from English, German, Irish and Turkish text corpora. He then proceeded to the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) in Melbourne for his PhD studies, writing a descriptive grammar of the Siar language, which is spoken in Southern New Ireland Province of Papua New Guinea.  University of Melbourne Florian is a PhD student in the Department of Computing and Information Sciences at the University of Melbourne. His research is on enabling language communities to contribute to language preservation without being overly dependent on a documentary linguist.  University of Goroka Kevin is a lecturer in the Centre for Melanesian Studies and is conducting research on language shift in the Kamano-Kafe language.  Dr René van den Berg SIL Papua New Guinea René van den Berg is a senior linguistics consultant with SIL. He studied linguistics at the University of Leiden where he obtained his PhD in 1989 on the basis of a descriptive grammar of Muna, a language of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Since then he has been involved in Bible translation and teaching linguistics at SIL schools in the UK, Australia and recently in South Korea. His main interests are Austronesian linguistics, lexicography and New Testament Greek. Dr van den Berg lives in Ukarumpa with his wife Lydia; they have two adult sons.  University of Southern California Ashish is a PhD student in the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. His research is on computational methods for language translation.  |
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