Technology (language)

[Nicholas Thieberger]

I agree with much of what Peter Constable says.

I was not criticising the article in the original posting in its
context, nor particularly the programme it discusses, but the posting
to ELL in the context of ELL.

We have seen a number of projects in Australia in which considerable
effort and money has gone into creating a nice looking set of
resources that could have been much better with minimal extra effort
if the principles discussed by Gary Simons and Steven Bird in
Language (2003), for example, were taken into account.

And, no, I don't exect community members to have read and understood
these arguments. But linguists, as professionals, are able to keep up
with current methods and techniques and to provide such advice.

This list is aimed at practitioners involved with language
documentation and preservation efforts.  It is to these specialists
that I was addressing my message. I suggest that we need to engage
with new technologies in ways that make our work more useful both for
our own aims, but also for future users of the material.

There is a mailing list for those interested in discussing current
approaches to documentation and revitalisation in the
Australian-SEAsia-Pacific region that explicitly includes new
technological issues, called the Resource Network for Linguistic
Diversity (RNLD)
(http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/RNLD/RNLDlist.htm)

And I will try to curb my knee-jerk reactions to Microsoft. It is
true that this is not the place for a discourse on monopoly
capitalism and the joys it has to offer the world.

Nick Thieberger
Melbourne Project Officer
Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered
Cultures (PARADISEC)
paradisec.org.au

>Peter_Constable at SIL.ORG wrote:
>I think appropriate assessment of the article needs to consider the
>context of its publication. This is published for a generic
>audience, not linguists and anthropologists concerned with language
>and culture death. The general public finds technology interesting,
>but isn't particularly clued in about language documentation.
>
>Were the technology tools appropriate? To answer that question we
>need to look at the goals of the project: using technologies is
>language *revitalization* efforts -- not language documentation. The
>project was driven by members of the language community, and
>evidently their interest was in the preparation of didactic
>materials. Were Powerpoint, Audacity and MaxAuthor appropriate tools
>for that purpose? I'm not aware of any reason to say they are not.
>
>Note that Microsoft had no involvement in this project. Funding was
>provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is not
>connected to Microsoft. Note that, of the three software products
>mentioned, only one was a Microsoft product; one is a product from
>an indenpendent software vendor, MaxView, and the other is an
>open-source project. Microsoft did not provide any tools; as far as
>I can tell, the people within the communities running the project
>selected the software products themselves. If we consider the facts,
>the comment about tieing users into deadend proprietary solutions
>seems to be no more then empty rhetoric.
>
>So, did I cringe for the reasons you suggest? No, not at all.
>Rather, I found your criticism to be completely unjustified,
>apparently a knee-jerk reaction to seeing references to Bill Gates
>and a Microsoft product.
>
>If you want to highlight the need for projects that adequately
>document languages that are dying, I'm with you wholeheartedly. If
>you want to criticize the author of the article for not giving
>adequate consideration of what might constitute preservation in a
>situation like this before using that term in the headline, I'd say
>you had a reasonable point.
>
>On the other hand, if you want to criticize the organizers of this
>project for not focusing more on language documentation, I'd say
>you're on shaky ground, at risk of being seen as a patronizing
>outsider. If you want to criticize Microsoft, I'd say you're
>completely unjustified and need to re-read the article. If you want
>to criticize Bill and Melinda Gates, I'd say you should look more
>carefully into the facts: they evidently funded the project
>apparently without any requirements regarding what software to use
>(and it seems to me bold to be criticizing a philanthropist who has
>just announced giving another $3 billion for projects such as this).
>
>I completely support efforts at language documentation,
>revitalization and preservation. I cannot, however, support
>criticism of a project because the reasonable goals of the community
>didn't meet the expectations of others, or criticism of a company
>that was in no way involved beyond one of their products being used.
>
>
>
>Peter Constable


--

ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Parkville, 3010
Australia

http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/thieberger.html/

ph: 03 8344 5185
fax: 03 8344 8990
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