Guest Lectures
2008
Doug Cooper discussed the development of the SALA, focusing on issues of general interest to archive builders for other language regions, including accurately extracting citations, exploiting citation graph analysis, providing semantic query expansion, dealing with copyright holders, and generating publication hierarchies. The presentation also included a discussion of the design and applications of a Web API for archives.
Professor Harrison gave a private screening to a capacity audience at the Halle Library of Eastern Michigan University on a new documentary film depicting the plight of several endangered languages in remote areas of Bolivia, India and and Siberia. The film is based on fieldwork conducted by Harrison and his colleague, Gregory Anderson of the Living Tongues Institute. A short trailer can be viewed at the link above.
The presentation was a good introduction to the basics in starting fieldwork on an American Indian language. Topics included getting contacts and permissions, collecting basic information on word order and paradigms, clarifying the goals of lexical data collection, illustrating elicitation techniques, and pointing out a few pitfalls in doing fieldwork.
This presentation explored the possibility of using GIS technology to map the grammatical systems of location, direction, and path found in specific hunting narratives by speakers of Ahtna, a highly endangered language in southcentral Alaska. The visualization aid resulting from an integration of this rich grammatical system with mapped and named locations could lead to a better understanding of the discourse structure of these texts.
Professor Poe, Eastern Michigan University's McAndless Scholar for 2007-2008 and a well-known commentator on the Wikipedia phenomenon, met with the ILIT/LINGUIST crew to praise their efforts to update linguistics articles in the online encyclopedia. He also made creative suggestions for publicizing other ILIT research projects, especially LL-MAP and Multi-Tree, suggesting a broad range of media outlets and possibilities.
2007
"Garden-Pathing and Surprisal: Word-to-Word Dependencies" with Marisa Ferrara Boston (Department of Linguistics, Michigan State University) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"Progress report on Tjupan, an endangered language of Western Australia" with Jessica Boynton (EMU Fulbright scholar, 2007-2008) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"Selected topics in language technology" with Robert Reck (RReckTek, Inc) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"Field audio formats and preservation" with Mike Casey (Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"Aspects of copyright for linguists" with Paul Newman (Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"A universal corpus" with Steven Abney (Department of Linguistics, University of Michigan) . Location: Undergraduate Science Building, University of Michigan.