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PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS (OPTIONAL)

Organized by Nicholas Thieberger (University of Hawai‘i at Manoa)

On February 9-10, 2011, we will have a variety of optional pre-conference technical training workshops in the Moore Hall 155B and 258 and in the Center for Korean Studies conference room, all near the main conference venue. Each workshop is half a day and are not included in the main conference fee.

All workshops are now closed, and we are no longer accepting registrations for them.

Workshop Fee

• One workshop (1/2 day) - $10
• Two workshops (one day's worth) - $15
• Four workshops (two day's worth) - $20

Workshop Schedule

Coming Prepared

If the workshop you sign up for are hands-on or technical in nature, you will need to bring your own laptop to participate. Rooms will come equipped with wireless internet access.

Workshop Descriptions

Flex (Presenter: Beth Bryson)
FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) is a linguistic database for lexicographical and text data collection and analysis. This workshop will cover: (1) Lexicon tasks: adding words to a lexicon, adding additional lexicographical information (including picture and sound files), sorting and filtering, output options for a dictionary. (2) Text glossing tasks: word glossing, morpheme glossing, searching via a concordance, output options for interlinear text. (3) Collateral dictionary tools: WeSay and LexiquePro. Time will be given for practice on most of the concepts; others will simply be demonstrated.

Elan (Presenter: Andrea Berez)
This three-hour workshop is an introduction to the basic functions of ELAN, a software tool for the creation of time-aligned, annotated audio and video language resources (MPI Nijmegen, http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/). Participants will learn how to conceptualize ELAN’s “types and tiers”, and we will work hands-on to create basic one- and two-language transcripts of audio and video. Materials will be provided, and the transcripts created in the workshop can then serve as templates for participants’ own language materials.

Advanced Toolbox (Presenter: Albert Bickford)
This workshop will be an opportunity for experienced Toolbox users to work together on their own projects while learning new techniques from other experienced users and from the facilitator.  Specific topics will be decided on by the participants themselves, based on their interests.  (This will be decided in the last couple months before the workshop based on who signs up by then.)  Possibilities include mass editing of Toolbox dictionary files, setting up text glossing for different needs and audiences, exporting data to XML, integrating with Lexique Pro, creating formatted output of dictionaries and interlinear texts, organization of data corpora, using Unicode with Toolbox, use of Toolbox for comparative dictionaries, etc.

Psycholinguistic techniques for the assessment of language strength (Presenters: Amy Schafer and William O'Grady)
This workshop will offer hands-on training in collecting and analyzing field-based psycholinguistic data relevant to the assessment of the relative 'strength' of languages in multilingual communities. We will present stimuli used in the HALA Project, describe key procedures in psycholinguistic data collection, and guide workshop participants through the use of HALA tools for data analysis. A major objective of the HALA system is to offer researchers an opportunity to diagnose language endangerment while it is still in its early phases, to compare language access in different age groups and in different geographical areas, and to monitor the success of attempts to revitalize indigenous languages in cases where such programs are under way. See http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/hala-project-hawaii-assessment-language-access for more information about the HALA Project.

Language acquisition for revitalization specialists (Presenters: William O'Grady, Virginia Yip, & Stephen Matthews)
An overview of key findings in field of language acquisition research of relevance to scholars involved in planning and implementing language revitalization programs. Presented by William O'Grady, a specialist on first language acquisition, and Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, renowned experts on bilingual language acquisition. This workshop will survey key findings in the field of language acquisition relevant to scholars involved in language maintenance and language revitalization programs. It will seek to address questions such as the following:

• What are the optimal conditions for language learning?
• What happens when those ideal conditions are not in place?
• How difficult is it to acquire and maintain two (or more) languages?
• Can anything be done to help children learn a language?
• Can a language be saved by children?
  

Video/film in language documentation (Presenter: Paul Rickard)
This course will cover issues related to the use of video in language documentation. Over three hours instruction will cover the use of cameras, tripods, lighting and optimizing the local environment to make the best recording possible. This course is not aimed at creating documentary film-makers, but rather at giving linguists some relevant skills in creating good documentation.

Archiving challenges and metadata - technical workshop  (Presenter: Alexander Koenig)
In this workshop we will discuss the use of metadata and will practice creating a number of metadata files by means of a tool called Arbil. Long-term archiving of digital material poses some problems due to the instable nature of current digital storage technology and of file formats and encodings that are commonly used. These problems lead to archiving policies that are not always in line with what would be most convenient for the depositors of the material, therefore it is important that the depositors are made aware of the reasoning behind these archiving policies. An archive might for example say that it does not accept Microsoft Word documents, whereas a large number of linguists use Word on a daily basis for all sorts of purposes. In this workshop we will discuss how these archiving policies come about and how they may have an impact on your daily work.

High-quality metadata descriptions that explain in detail what the content of the archived resources is are essential for current and future use of archived material. For linguistic material, they would for example contain information about the speaker(s), the language(s), the date of recording, the location, the “genre” of the recording, etc. Users of the archive often want to find resources that fit rather specific needs. A linguist might for example be interested in finding all recordings of female speakers of Hawaiian over the age of 70. An anthropologist might want to compare video recordings of various Polynesian communities building a canoe. Only if this sort of information is present in the metadata descriptions, their searches will lead them to the correct resources in the archive.

Participants are requested to bring their own laptops to the workshop.

LEXUS and VICOS - lexicon and conceptual spaces - technical workshop (Presenter: Alexander Koenig)
The technical workshop will give an introduction to the LEXUS and ViCoS tools and a hands-on tutorial. After the workshop the participants will be able to build a "my-first" lexicon in LEXUS and derive a concept network in a ViCoS conceptual space from this lexicon.

LEXUS is an 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. 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). The LEXUS lexicon is the basis of the conceptual space.

Participants are requested to bring their own laptops to the workshop.

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