Human subjects review survey

I am conducting an informal survey on linguists’ (particularly fieldworkers’) experiences with human subjects approval. The survey is very short and is entirely anonymous.

Click here to take survey

Results will be posted here when the survey is completed.

LSA 2010 Bloggers

Neal’s suggested Friday (Jan 8th) at 9pm in the hotel bar for the linguabloggers and those-friendly-to-linguabloggers for our … must be getting on for 5th! Annual Linguistics Bloggers “meeting”. Hope to see you all there.

this is why “saving” endangered languages is doomed

in a word, because there’s so much more enthusiasm for making stuff up about “aliens” that’s only slightly exotic than for taking the trouble to learn from real people about languages that are really different from ours.

[this is not a criticism, just a comment about human nature.]

Pama-Nyungan language coordinates updated

I’ve updated the file of centroid coordinates for Australian languages (particularly Pama-Nyungan) for google earth. The file is available here. Please note the following:

• Strictly non-commercial use only.
• I’m interested if anyone uses/downloads the file, so drop me a line if you do!
• I know that various languages are still misplaced. In particular, I haven’t done much in the way of proofing northern Cape York or Victoria, or South-West WA.
• This version has some subgroup polygons too. They are wrong; I don’t think that these are the primary subgroups of Pama-Nyungan and many of the borders are incorrectly placed, but they are useful as a background for eyeballing cognate distributions so I’ve included them.

Fieldwork vocab tool for mac

This Mac visual dictionary looks like quite a useful thing for collecting vocabulary on fieldwork. (I haven’t downloaded it or tried it but will do so if it’s still around when I next teach field methods.)

PDF database

I have no idea if this is legal, but pdf downloads.com seems to have a rather extensive collection on fieldwork materials.

Fieldwork and the movies (2): Stargate

Some time ago I published a somewhat postmodern analysis of Indiana Jones as fieldworker. Continuing in that vein, or next model for linguistic fieldwork comes from Stargate. Daniel Jackson is a fieldworker after my own heart. Not only is a detailed knowledge of historical linguistics vital to the success of his field research (“oh, it’s just a dialect related to Middle Egyptian”); he also illustrates the difficulties of monolingual field research and the possibilities of personal entanglements of a dubious ethical nature. He speaks a lot of languages, most of which are ultimately useless for the task which puts him in the most danger. He comes up with magical analyses from highly corrupted data, and he somehow doesn’t seem to notice that he’s working with a bunch of nutters. Finally, he is also keenly aware of local capacity building.