We have set up a
folder session-material which contains a subfolder FM1 which is to
contain subfolders for each session, e.g. 20070313, in which you will
find subfolders such as 01ALL, in which you will
find the sound files, and any notes that people have made. Any
material you want to put up, send it to me and I'll put it up.
Eventually we will have a WebCT site, but the transfer of large sound
files into and out of WebCT is very painful at the moment.
The .wav files are uncompressed, and so are VERY large. They are
what we will be archiving. The .mp3 files are compressed, and so
easier to download.
Aidan has
devised a description of the workflow for getting the files
from the Marantz into .mp3 format and onto this teaching website for
students to download, and for getting the files into the PARADISEC
archiving workflow. You can download the .doc
file here.
A key point
about transcription is time-alignment. Ideally, you want to be
able to go to the exact place in a recording where you have recorded a
word or sentence. We will start by using the program Transcriber, because it is
simple, free and cross-platform. You can download Transcriber
from Sourceforge. Alas it
does not seem to be maintained.
Caution:
Say at the
beginning of your file if you are transcribing the .mp3 version or the
.wav version. If you open a transcript originally linked to the
.mp3 version and link it to the .wav version you'll get weird clunking
and misaligning. Of course
ideally you would time-align the text to the uncompressed .wav
file. Practically however, they may be too big for your computer
to work with comfortably.
Elicitation
prompts
Nick Evans has kindly
made available to us his reciprocals elicitation prompts from the Reciprocals
Project. NOT FOR FURTHER DISTRIBUTION.
You can download the video prompts here
(151Mb), or else borrow the CD from me. I recommend that you look
at the questionnaire
associated with the project.
Linguistic
Fieldwork Preparation:
a guide for field linguists is meant to be a comprehensive web-resource
for the benefit of the linguistic community at large, from those who
teach courses in field methods, endangered languages, and language
revitalization, to those who do or wish to conduct field research.
On the WebCT site you will find a draft of Claire Bowern's Field Methods book, reproduced with
her permission, but not for further distribution.
Bibliography
background on linguistic documentation:
S. Bird and G. Simons. 2003. Seven dimensions of portability
for language documentation and description. Language 79:557-582.
Conference version available at http://arXiv.org/abs/cs/0204020
N. Himmelmann. 1998. Documentary and descriptive linguistics. Linguistics 36:161-195. Also
in Osamu SAKIYAMA and Fubito ENDO eds. Lectures on Endangered
Languages:5 (Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim, Kyoto, 2002) [PDF,
252kB]