Guest Lectures
2012
"Research Unit: Quantitative Language Comparison" with Steven Moran (University of Washington) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
"TEI XML for Linguists" with Piotr Banski (Institute for German Language) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
Dr. Banski is a member of the Council of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). He introduced the various use cases of the TEI XML standard for linguists, including corpus annotation, dictionary creation, various linguistic annotation standard, and new perspectives and developments in the TEI-domain that are or might be relevant for linguists.
Dr. Ćavar presented the results of a series of experiments pertaining to the perception of the English vocalic contrast in high vowels by learners with different L1 backgrounds. The goal of this and similar studies was to determine how perceptual strategies of L2 learners differ from those of English native speakers and what these differences depended on. In the long run, the aim was to predict “customized” areas of difficulty for learners with different backgrounds and to help develop curricula and teaching aids that would actually respond to learners’ needs.
"On the technologies and standards of eBooks and Print-on-demand, and self-publishing services." with Damir Ćavar (Department of Linguistics at Eastern Michigan University) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
The presentation covered the currently relevant technologies and standards around eBooks (Amazon, iBooks, Barnes and Noble), as well as the print on demand services as for example offered by Lulu.com. We discussed methods and ways to generate appropriate eBook- and PoD-files, how to acquire ISBN-numbers, get the book catalogued internationally, and how to organize the real publication and sale.
"Creole Genesis and the Role of Founding Populations" with Dr. Marlyse Baptista (University of Michigan) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
2011
"Session on Linguistic Fieldwork in Graduate Studies" with Olivia Sammons (University of Alberta) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
Olivia Sammons gave a talk about her experiences conducting linguistic fieldwork. After her talk, there was a question and answer sessions where we asked her about her fieldwork, about applying to grad schools, and about graduate/PhD study in general.
"Discussion Session about Preparing for Graduate School" with Monica Macauley (Department of Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
Monica led a discussion session with students to answer questions about linguistics, preparing for the profession, or graduate school.
2010
"Discovering and Safeguarding the Medefaidrin Language" with Eno-Abasi Urua (University of Uyo, Nigeria) . Location: The LINGUIST List (Cooper Building).
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.