by Lena Karvovskaya and Soraya Hosni

The DoBeS Project “Languages of Southwest Ambrym” is happy to invite you to an exhibit in the newly opened exhibition-center Humboldt-Box in the heart of Berlin. The exhibit “Sprachdokumentation auf Südwest-Ambrym” (Flyer with more information) will be open to the public from 1st of July till 31st of December 2011.

The project team members wanted the installation to present the different ways in which culture, language and knowledge are transmitted within written (books and recordings) and oral societies (sand drawing and story telling). The highlights of the installation are sandroings: a unique form of art practiced in Vanuatu. An example of such a performance is shown in a short film “The Liliwi masks story” projected on the ground. The film shows an elder man drawing complex geometric figures onto the sand with a continuous one finger movement so that it will end up forming a specific picture. The drawing is followed by a story or a description. This is a sandroing performance. The Liliwi masks story has a sand drawing to illustrate the narrative.

A typical sandroing

The exhibit shows an original Sandroing left by Abel Taho as he was our guest in Berlin from Ambrym. Visitors can also try themselves to make the performance, all you need to do is to follow the instructions which a young girl on the video is giving you: Joelyne teaches German children how to draw a breadfruit. Additionally you can watch a film on the process of linguistic fieldwork at the installation. One can see how the recordings are being transcribed and translated and how a dictionary is being composed. There is also a beautiful illustration for the dictionary done by local artist Joebang Maaseng.

For those who want to see and hear more about the “Languages of Southwest Ambrym”, there is a video channel on Youtube, where Soraya Hosni shares her works. At the moment it contains the film about language documentation, the video of the Liliwi sandroing performance and two films which give you instructions on how to make a sandroing yourself. The channel will be regularly updated with new films.

Visitors at the Ambrym exhibition

The project “Languages of Southwest Ambrym” is also presented to the broader public through “Science movies”, the videoblog of the Volkswagen foundation. “Wer spricht noch Daakaka?” is a series of 10 shorts, filmed by Susanne Fuchs and Soraya Hosni, in which we follow them on their journey from Berlin to Ambrym. We learn about daily life in the island, from preparing meals and basic hygiene to how houses are built or marriages are celebrated. We can admire the unique volcanic landscape and tropical vegetation but we can also learn about how the “Languages of Southwest Ambrym” team conduct linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork and collaborate with local leaders, schools and children to make the best out of the research and contribute to the survival of the Ambrym language and culture for future generations.

The Project “Languages of Southwest Ambrym” has started in August 2009. It investigates three language varieties spoken on Ambrym, a volcanic island in the northern part of Vanuatu: Daakaka, Daakiye and Dal kalaen. The goal of the project is documentation of linguistic and cultural heritage of the people of Ambrym. During extensive fieldwork sessions the team members make recordings of custom stories and cultural practices. Among others the project has created a collection of sandroings. Each drawing has been documented together with the language performance.

The team members are: Prof. Dr. Manfred Krifka, Soraya Hosni, Kilu von Prince, Dr. Susanne Fuchs and Lena Karvovskaya (student assistant). To learn more about the Project “Languages of Southwest Ambrym” visit the official websites at the MPI or at the ZAS.

by Jacquelijn Ringersma and Paul Trilsbeek

Language documentation is a field in linguistics which went through a “technology driven” change over the last 10 to 15 years. Linguists have been going into the field for decades making sound recordings of languages and linguistic events. However the miniaturization of recording equipment made it much easier to make large quantities of high quality audio recordings. In addition, upcoming affordable, high quality, video equipment permitted an extension of documentation work from audio to the visual dimension. The latter made it possible to document the languages within their natural and cultural context, which triggered the establishment of a branch within linguistics where the creation of a rich multimedia corpus for languages that are threathened with extinction became the main goal. In addition to collecting large amounts of primary audio and video recordings, numerous derived resources are produced: annotations and transcriptions, lexica, grammars, field notes etc.

The DoBeS (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen/Documentation of Endangered Languages) programme, which started about 10 years ago, was among the first funding initiatives for endangered languages documentation projects. An important aspect of this programme was the establishment of a central, specialized archive to take care of long-term preservation of the valuable material that was collected by the documentation projects. The central archive, which is based at the Max Planck Insitute for Psycholinguistics, was made an essential part of the programme because one had become aware of the fact that large amounts of recordings about languages and cultures were in danger of being lost forever. Old tapes and films that are not stored in specialized climatized rooms rapidly degrade over time, but the situation is even worse for modern digital storage media such as DVDs and hard disks. Even if the media would survive, the technology changes so fast that it is very unlikely that there will be equipment around to read today’s storage media 20 years from now. A specialized digital archive will continuously migrate the stored material to the latest storage technology and will also migrate the stored file formats should they become obsolete.

Some researchers have their doubts about storing their resources in an online archive. Arguments presented to us are in the form of: (1) Once my material is in there, I will not be able to get it out; or (2) Other researchers will use my material without giving me the credit and do all kinds of nice things with it. However, when you store material in the MPI archive, you will maintain full control over the access to the data through an online access management system (AMS). You are the owner of the data, and you will remain the owner of the data. You decide who you will grant access. This opens up opportunities to give access to members of the speech communities or the relatives of those recorded.

The MPI archive accepts deposits from linguists who do not have an affiliation with the MPI or DoBeS. Storing your data in the MPI archive has the advantage that the data is stored in an organized manner and that you can use online tools to search through your data. You can also use online tools to visualize your data in an attractive manner. But most important, we will safeguard your data by making various backup copies in the Netherlands and Germany, by always using the latest state of the art in storage technology and by migrating to newer file formats should the current ones become obsolete in the future.

If you are interested in storing your language data in the MPI archive, please inquire about the conditions with one of the archive managers: Paul Trilsbeek or Jacquelijn Ringersma.

by Jacquelijn Ringersma

LEXUS is our online tool for the creation of multimedia lexica and encyclopedic dictionaries. LEXUS is targeted at linguistics involved in language documentation, but also actively used by researchers in Sign Language research. LEXUS is based on the ISO recommendation for Language Resource Management (ISO TC37/SC4), providing a Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) lexicon structure and a concept naming registry (ISOcat). With LEXUS, users can create lexica from scratch, but also import lexica created in Toolbox or other XML based tools. Lexica using LMF and ISOcat are interoperable with each other, allowing for multi lexicon searches and merging of lexica. Users may customize views of the word list and lexical entries. Standard functionality, like sorting or filtering of word lists is already available and we are currently working on paper output options. One of the major strengths of the online tool is that users may share their lexica with other users, either on a read only or read/write basis.

ViCoS is an extension of LEXUS, with which users can create relations between lexical entries, using fuzzily defined relation types. The result of this network of relations can be a conceptual space, where each word is represented as an element in a network of other related words. Relations can be ‘universal’ (e.g. A_is_a_B) or specifically defined for a particular lexicon (A_eats_B). In its current version ViCoS can only be used from the LEXUS user interface, since the words are the basis of the conceptual space. Future plans for ViCoS envisage that the tool will be central in the creation of a customized ‘eScience environment’, a user-defined workspace where users can link any type of resource into new organizational layers.

LEXUS and ViCoS training and support

Recently we did a LEXUS/ViCoS training session in the Winter School Saami Language Documentation and Revitalization in Bodø, Norway. Some 25 participants were trained in creating lexica, adding multimedia fragments, customizing views and creating conceptual spaces. Although the training was basic and could not cover the full functionality of LEXUS and ViCoS, most users were enthusiastic about the tools and registered as LEXUS users after the training.

At the Saami Winter School (photo by Lena Karvovskaya)

If you are interested in using the tools, you may request a LEXUS user account by sending an e-mail to Jacquelijn Ringersma. We have regular LEXUS and ViCoS training in the DoBeS training weeks, or in summer schools and language documentation workshops.

by Jacquelijn Ringersma

From February 5 to February 8, there was a workshop on documentation and archiving in Guwahati, Assam (India). 22 participants were trained in the recording of audio and video, handling of audio and video files, and use of the LAT software. Two members of the MPI’s technical group were among the workshop trainers.

Participants trying out the video equipment

The archiving workshop was organised by DoBeS, in collaboration with Guwahati University and the Phonogrammarchiv (Austria). Its purpose was to train local linguists in best practices and current methods of documenting languages and cultures. The workshop was financed by the Volkwagen foundation, within the framework of the DoBeS project: The Traditional Songs and Poetry of Upper Assam.

Strengthen local capacity

The project aims at multifaceted linguistic and ethnographic documentation of the Tangsa, Tai and Singpho communities in Margherita (North-East India). The Guwahati workshop contributes to the project by strengthening the local capacity. Among the trainees were students and PhD’s of the Guwahati University and staff members of the National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC).