This week I’ve been giving three talks in the Department of Linguistics at UC Berkeley. It’s been a very stimulating week, with lots of good feedback, brainstorming for new directions, and problem troubleshooting. I’ve also met with many of the graduate students (including two who were my students as undergraduates and who worked on the data that led to some of the results presented in the talks) to hear about their work.
I’m posting slides for two of the talks here. On Monday, I gave an overview of the Pama-Nyungan project and talked about how the tree was created, what it implies to take an ‘evolutionary’ view of language (in this framework), and some off-shoots of the project (MondayPhylogenetics powerpoint). On Wednesday, I talked about one further extension, using the tree to investigate the evolution of colo(u)r terminology. (WednesdayColor powerpoint.)
The other talk, on Tuesday, was on using my Bardi corpus to study life-span changes and variation. At the end of the talk when I was chatting, one of the sociolinguists expressed surprise that I hadn’t anonymized the identities of the Bardi speakers. I hadn’t thought about it. As a fieldworker working on Bardi, I did talk about this general point with the people I worked with, and all were keen to be acknowledged for their work on the language, and recognized among the key custodians of their culture. However, with the work on aging and variation, I am no longer talking directly about Bardi as a language, and more about the properties of the speech of individual speakers, and the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I am with putting that up online without talking to Bardi people about it first. It’s not just a matter of anonymizing the slides, because there are so few speakers, anyone who has any of my other Bardi work will be able to easily work out who I’m talking about. There will be a paper (soon I hope) on using forced alignment in field research, so some of the results will be in that paper, probably now along with a discussion of the ethics of same.
Anggarrgoon 
I find that I straddle this line quite a bit – is this an experiment or is this “fieldwork”? For anything that is controlled at the time of recording, I tend to think of it as an experiment, so people are anonymous to readers. Otherwise, peoples’ texts are never anonymized (they’re archived that way too). It’s made all the more difficult to figure out since my IRB states that I’m not doing human subjects research. Everyone still signs a consent form though (because different organizations might require it even if IRB does not, explicitly).