I will be holding a summer ‘grammar boot camp’ from July 5 to July 29, 2016. The idea is to have up to four advanced undergraduate students work intensively on existing high-quality archival field notes and recordings with the aim of producing a publishable sketch grammar. Students will receive a stipend and travel expenses to come to Yale. This follows from a very successful first bootcamp in 2015.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program; as such, applicants are limited to US citizens or permanent residents. Students who have graduated in Spring 2016 will be eligible to apply. That is, the targeted cohort is undergraduates who will have just finished either their junior or senior year.
The materials to be worked on will be from an Australian Aboriginal language from Western Australia and will include both print materials and audio files. It is probable that the ‘print’ materials will already be digitized and in Toolbox.
Students will meet once a day as a group with me to discuss analyses and writing. They will spend the rest of the time working with the materials in the Linguistics department. They will receive regular detailed feedback on the analysis and writing. Familiarity with Australian languages is not required but I would expect that successful applicants would do some reading of grammars of related languages prior to the start of the boot camp.
Applications for the boot camp are now open. The deadline for applications is January 22, 2016, and applicants will be notified of the result in mid-February.
To apply, please send the following materials electronically:
. a letter of application, describing your experience in linguistics, including research experience, your future plans, and why you’d like to join the boot camp.
. a writing sample, such as a linguistics term paper
. course transcript (this can be an unofficial transcript)
Please send materials as file attachments to bootcamp@pamanyungan.net, cc’ed to claire.bowern@yale.edu. Applications will be acknowledged within 2 days – if you don’t get an acknowledgment, please let me know.
Please also arrange for one or two letters of recommendation/support from faculty to be sent to the same email addresses, also by January 22.
Students will need to show some evidence of prior research experience (e.g. through an RA-ship or by having a senior thesis in progress) and some familiarity with language documentation procedures (e.g. through having taken a field methods class or equivalent, such as having attended CoLang or a LSA Institute class). Applicants will need to show attention to detail and ability to focus on a project for a sustained period. Students will need to be able to travel to New Haven for the entire period of the boot camp and should expect to work solely on this project during that time, including some evenings and weekends.
Anggarrgoon 
Way to go Claire! What’s the lucky language this time?
Our Roro/Waima project now has a sample dictionary (print and electronic) to show. Once I get through all the jobs I’ve come home with I’ll be searching for some funding and considering trying crowd funding. It all takes energy though, and I seem to be running a bit low on that commodity. I put the two consultants in charge of the cameras when we went to the market. Joe interviewed some young blokes selling sausages. They all knew each other and the boys played up to the camera saying that one fellow was the boss and the others were his bodyguards, just like on the movies, and that soon droves of villagers would be coming for his sausages and they’d even want to ‘book-up’. A snippet of Joe and Ikupu transcribing the text is here: https://youtu.be/zBAyo1nAlgQ Very hot here at the moment. Komiaho harai (go well). Colleen
Great! Thanks for the update, glad to hear things are going well!