Course information

Course description

Contemporary language documentation is dedicated to collecting, annotating, curating, and disseminating long-lasting, multipurpose records of the linguistic practices of a language communities. This course will give you the skills you need to produce such a documentation, with special attention given to digital data collection, data sustainability, and the documentation of language-in-use. The skills you develop in this class can be extended to future fieldwork, community-based language work, and/or toward bringing an existing documentation project in line with current practice. Students will (1) gain an understanding of the current best practices in digital language documentation; (2) develop skills in a prosody-based transcription system that can be applied to any spoken language; (3) become familiar with key software and hardware used in our field; (4) develop skills to troubleshoot data management problems in a variety of fieldwork situations. By the end of the course, students will be able to plan for conducting best-practice language documentation project of their own, from equipment purchase to recording language-in-use to data annotation to archiving and dissemination.

Learning objectives

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

  1. Develop a Data Management Plan for various types of language documentation projects.
  2. Collect appropriate metadata for the documentation and managing it with specialized collection software lameta.
  3. Create, edit, and convert high-quality audio and video recordings for archival and for dissemination to different audiences.
  4. Create and maintain a linked lexical and text corpus database using Fieldworks Langauge Explorer (FLEx) software that can be exported in various format for further annotation and/or dissemination.
  5. Transcribe language in use using time-aligned transcription software ELAN and a prosody-based transcription system that can be applied to any spoken language.

Required materials

Students are required to have (or have access to) the following:

Software

Equipment

  • You will need access to a computer with at least 1GB of space (or at the very least an external hard drive), since we will be working with video and audio files that can be quite large.
    • If this is going to be an issue, please communicate it to me early on in the semester.
  • I recommend purchasing closed-back (‘circumaural’) monitoring headphones for transcription and monitoring recordings.
  • You do not need to purchase any video or audio equipment; I will lend out equipment for you to use for these activities.

Inclusivity policies

Diversity and Civility

We consider this virtual classroom to be a place where you will be treated with respect, and we welcome individuals of all ages, backgrounds, beliefs, ethnicities, genders, gender identities, gender expressions, national origins, religious affiliations, sexual orientations, ability – and other visible and nonvisible differences. All members of this class are expected to contribute to a respectful, welcoming and inclusive environment for every other member of the class.

Preferred Names and Pronouns

We will gladly honor your request to address you by a preferred name or gender pronoun. Please advise us of this preference early in the semester so that we can make appropriate changes to our records.

Needs (ADA Statement)

If you have a disability for which you need accommodations in this class or any other special need (e.g. religious holidays), please inform the instructor as soon as possible. The KOKUA Program (Office for Students with Disabilities) can be reached at (808) 956-7511 or (808) 956-7612 (voice/text) in room 013 of the Queen Lili‘uokalani Center for Student Services.

Assignments & Grading

  1. Participation & reading responses 20%
  • Students are required to be at every class and participate in class discussions of the readings.
  • When readings are assigned, students are required to send two responses (approximately 3-5 sentences each) that contain commentary, criticisms, or questions on the Laulima forum about the reading by 8pm on the Saturday before the reading is to be discussed.
  • Each student is required to reply to two of their classmates’ responses by 10am on Monday (approximately 2-4 sentences each).
  1. Homework assignments 20%
  • There will be a number of short assignments on the topics being discussed in class.
    1. IRB/CITI certification assignment
    2. Metadata assignment
    3. ELAN assignment
    4. FLEx lexicon assignment
    5. FLEx glossing assignment
    6. ELAN-FLEx-ELAN import export assignment
    7. Data management plan
    8. Audio assignment
    9. Video assignment
    10. Transcription
  1. Presentations 20%
  1. Audiovisual recording & transcription 20%
  • Each student will make a recording of a conversation of at least 1/2 hour.
    • The recording must use video with a separate audio recorder.
    • The audio and video will be synced, edited and exported in Adobe Premiere Pro for transcription in ELAN.
  • Students will transcribe a small portion of the recording using Discourse Transcription (Du Bois et al. 1993).
  1. Documentation enrichment project 20%

  • As a class, we will work together on enriching a documentation project, and each student will be responsible for enriching some portion of the documentation. In week four of the semester, we will begin discussing the areas of the documentation project on which each student would like to work. The goal of this project is to give students hands on experience working with documentary materials, using the technical skills that they have learned in this class.

  • Documentation of Rejang

    • This semester we will be working as a class with the Dr. Richard (Dick) McGinn’s (1939-2018) documentation of Rejang [glottocode: reja1240, an Austronesian language of southwest Sumatra (see Coady & McGinn 1982; McGinn 1982; 1997; 1998; 2000; 2003; 2005; 2009; Blust 1984). Dr. McGinn’s documentation and description goes back to the 1970s and consists primarily of fieldnotes and descriptions of various aspects of the language (see Blust 2018 for an account of Dr. McGinn’s life and work).

    • I have been given access to a portion of this documentation with the task of preparing a curated collection of Rejang in Kaipuleohone Language Archive. We will convert proprietary and arcane file formats into archival PDFs, providing appropriate metadata with lameta, and where possible inputting portions of the documentation into FLEx or even ELAN.

Attendance and attentiveness

  • Attendance in this course is crucial. In order to be successful in the course, you really need to attend every class and be punctual whether we are meeting in person or over Zoom. Excessive absences or tardiness may result in a grade reduction. If you know that you are going to be absent, please talk to me as soon as you can so that we can develop a plan.
  • Please be attentive during class. This means that you should not be multi-tasking (e.g., responding to emails, chatting in discord, or posting on Facebook).
  • In each class be ready to discuss the readings and participate in the discussion.

Course readings

The course readings listed in the course schedule can be accessed through Laulima Resource folder unless they are already available online.

Course schedule

Readings and due dates WILL change.

Week 1 (1/10): Introduction

  • Readings: Bird & Simons (2003), Arkhipov & Thieberger (2018)

  • Class activities:

    • Introductions
    • Review syllabus
      • Discuss class format
      • Discuss audio and video recording assignments
      • Discuss software
    • Technology & Lang Doc (handout) (slides)
    • Seven dimensions of Lang Doc (slides)

  • Additional Readings: Seifart et al. (2018), Austin (2016)

Week 2 (1/17): No Class | MLK Day

Week 3 (1/24): Data management & Human subjects

  • Readings: Mattern (2022),DiPersio (2014), Cox (2022)
  • Class activities:
    • Slides
    • Sign up for Presentation 1
  • Assignments:
    • Continue to work on Archiving for the Future online course (due Feb 7)
  • Additional readings: Robinson (2010), Bowern (2015: ch. 11), van Driem (2016), Bowern (2010), Nicholas Thieberger & Berez (2012)

Week 4 (1/31): Archiving & Metadata

  • Readings:
  • Class activities: Slides
  • Assignments:
  • Additional readings: Burnard (2005), Nick Thieberger, Harris & Barwick (2015), Salffner (2015)

Week 5 (2/7): ELAN

Week 6 (2/14): Audio recording

  • Readings:

    • Meakins et al. (2018: p. 48-54, 61-65, sections 3.2.1-3.2.4, 3.3.2)
    • Margetts & Margetts (2011: p. 13-32)
    • Artis (2014: p. 183-216)

  • Class activities: Slides

  • Assignments:

  • Additional readings: Nathan (2008: section 4), Bowern (2015: section 2.2)

Week 7 (2/21): No class | Presidents’ Day

Week 8 (2/28): Video recording

  • Readings:
    • Seyfeddinipur & Rau (2020)
    • Seyfeddinipur (2011: section 6.4)
    • Artis (2014: p. 35-83, 113-182)
  • Class activities:
  • Assignment: Audio recording assignment
  • Additional readings: Dimmendaal (2010: p. 33-53) and Margetts & Margetts (2011)

Week 9 (3/7): Video editing and conversion

Week 10 (3/14): No Class | Spring Break

Week 12 (3/28): FLEx II

Week 13 (4/4): FLEx-ELAN import | export

Week 14 (4/11): Transcription (Level 1)

  • Readings: Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (2006), Nicholas P. Himmelmann (2018), Du Bois et al. (1992: ch. 1, 4-6, 10) (Introduction, Units, Speakers, Transitional Continuity, Pause)
  • Assignment: ELAN FLEx import export assignment
  • Additional readings:
  • Class activities: slides

Week 15 (4/18): Transcription (Level 2)

  • Readings: Du Bois et al. (1992: ch. 11-12), Du Bois handouts (Vocal Noises, Quality)
  • Assignment:
    • Complete DT take-home task.
    • Transcribe three minutes of conversation up to level 1. Be ready to share/discuss excerpt!
  • Additional readings: Dingemanse & Floyd (2014)
  • Class activities: slides, slides, slides

Week 16 (4/25): Transcription (Level 3)

  • Readings: Du Bois et al. (1992: ch. 17), Du Bois handouts (Spelling)
  • Assignment:
    • Transcribe three minutes of conversation up to level 2.5 (i.e., transitional continuity (, . ?), pause, laughter, overlap, unintelligble speech). Be ready to share/discuss excerpt!
  • Additional readings:
  • Class activities: slides

Week 17 (5/2): Annotation & Final Presentations

  • Readings: Schultze-Berndt (2006), McDonnell (to appear)

  • Assignment:

    • Enrich three minutes of conversation up to level 3 and upload to Laulima.
    • Documentation Enrichment Project final presentation

References

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Artis, Anthony Q. 2014. The shut up and shoot documentary guide: A Down & Dirty DV production 2nd edition. New York ; London: Focal Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
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