Workshops and Conferences
2009
"Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure Workshop" with Lyle Campbell (University of Utah), Helen Aristar-Dry (Eastern Michigan University), Anthony Aristar (Eastern Michigan University) . Location: Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure workshop is designed as the first step in a larger project, which is intended to produce an authoritative catalogue, database, and updatable website of information on endangered languages and enrich the infrastructure of the discipline by integrating accurate EL information into a network of digital information and research facilities. This workshop has been convened in order to plan the project and to promote productive discussion among major scholars about key questions involved in the collection and dissemination of information about endangered languages. ELIIP Sponsors The workshop is sponsored jointly by the University of Utah, through the Center for American Indian Languages (CAIL), and Eastern Michigan University, through the Institute for Language Information and Technology (home of The LINGUIST List). Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
"LEGO Workshop" with Gary Simons (Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
Gary Simons (SIL) worked with the LEGO team to establish a workflow for getting lexicons into a searchable database. The team further focused its priorities and goals and did some hands-on work, learning about xslt from Simons.
"LEGO Workshop" with Gary Simons (Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
Gary Simons (SIL) worked with the LEGO team to establish a workflow for getting lexicons into a searchable database. The team further focused its priorities and goals and did some hands-on work, learning about xslt from Simons.
Hunter, Stephanie, Andrea and Gary presented on the difficulties of mainating and digitizing geolinguistic data. This presentation was based on work conducted at the Alaska Native Language Archive (at University of Alaska, Fairbanks) in August of 2008 as part of the LL-Map project. Findings were presented at the 1st International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation at the beautiful University of Hawaii. If you would like to hear the presentation, please visit the conference website.
"LEGO Workshop" with Gary Simons (Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)), Scott Farrar (University of Washington), Steve Moran (University of Washington), Shakthi Poornima (University at Buffalo) . Location: Cooper Building, Eastern Michigan University.
The LEGO team met to discuss methods to be used in the project, use cases and workflow. They also discussed the GOLD Ontology and how it would be developed in the future.
2008
"Michigan Linguistics Society 38th Annual Meeting" with Catherine Adams (Eastern Michigan University), Edward Garrett (Eastern Michigan University), Beverly Goodman (Eastern Michigan University) . Location: McGregor Memorial Conference Center; Wayne State University; Detroit, Michigan.
At the 38th annual meeting of the Michigan Linguistics Society (MLS), Catherine Adams, Edward Garrett, and Beverly Goodman gave a presentation on the results of the comparison of the duration of tense versus lax vowels in a corpus of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speech from Southeastern Michigan.
"Towards an XML Schema for Language Data" with Ania Kubisz (LINGUIST List), Evelyn Richter (LINGUIST List), Stephanie Morse (LINGUIST List) . Location: Wayne State University.
Ania, Evelyn, and Stephanie presented their work on developing an XML Schema at the Michigan Linguistics Society's 38th Annual Meeting. The project was initiated as an update to the EMELD School of Best Practices' Biao Mien case study, and evolved into a schema for all languages, not just Biao Mien. In addition to the schema, a Perl parser was written and an XSLT was designed to extract and display the Biao Mien data.
Bethany Townsend and Susan Smith presented a poster on the NSF-funded grant project MultiTree at the LSA 2008 Summer Meeting for Graduate and Undergraduate Students at The Ohio State University. The focus of the poster was how MultiTree benefits the study of language relationships, compared to the problems and difficulties associated with finding the same information in traditional book or paper form.
Gary Holton (Alaska Native Language Center) is revising the Alaska Native language map to reflect new work on overlapping isoglosses used to define language boundaries in Alaska. He worked with the LL-MAP team and the director of EMU's IGRE to geo-register his isoglosses and placenames.
This was the first workshop of ILIT's newest project, "Implementing the GOLD Community of Practice: Laying the Foundations for a Linguistics Cyberinfrastructure." Its participants included Scott Farrar (University of Washington), Gary Simon (SIL International) and Damir Cavar (Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics and Indiana University), who are working with the ILIT team to increase the amount of ontology-aware linguistic data available to the researcher.
This workshop was led by Professor Arienne Dwyer, an anthropological linguist at the University of Kansas and one of the founding partners of the LL-MAP project. She discussed the extensive field data she has collected for four documentation projects that focus on languages of Western China: Salar (Turkic), Monguor (Mongolic), Northwest Chinese and Amdo Tibetan. The workshop also featured Dr. Yichun Xie, director of EMU's Institute for Geospatial Research & Education (IGRE) and co-principal investigator on the LL-MAP project, who demonstrated how to create maps using ArcMap and how it can be used to integrate Professor Dywer's data into the LL-MAP system.
2007
"Toward the Interoperability of Language Resources (TILR)" Location: Stanford University.
Building on two previous summer workshops held in 2006, ILIT and Professor Arienne Dwyer of the University of Kansas co-organized the TILR workshop held at Stanford University in conjunction with the 2007 LSA Summer Institute. The goal was to work toward resolving the crucial issue of interoperability when developing data management tools for creating sustainable and accessible digital resources for linguistics. Attending the workshop groups and demonstration sessions was an interdisciplinary group of documentary linguists, computational linguists, and language engineers. ILIT Co-Director Helen Aristar-Dry and Associate Manager Michael Appleby gave presentations. The Workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 0709680).
"14th Annual Symposium on Stabilizing Indigenous Languages (SILS)" Location: Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.
Since 1994, SILS has been a national annual forum for educators and activists involved in teaching, documenting, and revitalizing American Indian and other indigenous languages. The 14th symposium was co-organized by ILIT and Dr. Margaret Noori, lecturer at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University. The symposium was held on the lands of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation. ILIT was responsible for many of the organizational responsibilties of the forum, including developing its website. ILIT Directors Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry led a roundtable discussion on "Issues in the Creation of Digital Language Resources."
All the linguists and map specialists collaborating on ILIT's LL-MAP project met for a two-day workshop to review the prototype website. It was led by ILIT's Helen Aristar-Dry and Anthony Aristar, and included other EMU researchers Verónica Grondona (English), Yichun Xie (IGRE) and Zongyao Sha (IGRE). Researchers from other U.S. and international institutions who are involved in the project are Hans-Jörg Bibiko, Bernard Comrie, Östen Dahl, Arienne Dwyer, David Germano, Gary Simons, Nick Thieberger, and Ljuba Veselinova. At the workshop, these researchers also demonstrated some of their own map projects. Together, the group worked out data upload procedures and other technical and structural solutions to ensure that LL-MAP will be interoperable with existing technologies. LL-MAP is supported by a National Science Foundation Grant (HSD 0527512).