Lecture by Dr Nicholas Thieberger for the World Oral Literature Project Occasional Lecture Series

Abstract

Digital tools are providing exciting new possibilities for linguists and ethnographers to collate and compile fieldwork data, and to share the results with communities of origin. In this lecture, Dr Thieberger will outline the methods he used in his work on South Efate (Vanuatu) which involved building a corpus at the same time as developing his linguistic analysis. He will then profile a more recent initiative to design an open-source method for hosting texts linked to streaming media online (EOPAS). Thieberger suggests that integrating such processes into fieldwork naturally results in better outcomes, both for speakers and for the research community, and reflects on the associated challenges and opportunities provided by these technologies.

Nicholas Thieberger is an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the University of Melbourne and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. He works on the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (www.paradisec.org.au) and is the technology editor for the journal Language Documentation and Conservation.