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<div>I agree with much of what Peter Constable says.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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)</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Nick Thieberger</div>
<div>Melbourne Project Officer</div>
<div>Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered
Cultures (PARADISEC)</div>
<div>paradisec.org.au</div>
<div><br></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font size="-1">Peter_Constable@SIL.ORG
wrote:</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">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).</font></tt></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
<tt><font size="-1">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.</font></tt><br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<tt><font size="-1">Peter Constable</font></tt></blockquote>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="-1"
color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">ARC Postdoctoral Fellow</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Department of Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">University of Melbourne</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Parkville, 3010</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">Australia</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font
color="#000000">http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/thieberger.html/</font
></div>
<div><font color="#000000"><br></font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">ph: 03 8344 5185</font></div>
<div><font color="#000000">fax: 03 8344 8990</font></div>
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