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<FONT FACE="Verdana">These projects and technologies may be of interest to members of this list.<BR>
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Bonnie<BR>
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A Year of Languages Workshop at the University of Toronto<BR>
<BR>
Research and Teaching Language and Culture Using New Technologies<BR>
Friday, February 16, 2007, 10 am-noon<BR>
Robarts Library, Rm 4049<BR>
<BR>
Registration at http://rcat.utoronto.ca/<BR>
<BR>
This event features two presentations on new technologies that enhance<BR>
research and teaching of less-commonly-taught languages and culture. Both<BR>
speakers have been involved in the development of innovative, open-source<BR>
software projects that focus on the teaching and research of language and<BR>
culture. These projects are integrated within a major open-access digital<BR>
library initiative that focuses on cultural and linguistic documentation of<BR>
Tibetan and Himalayan regions. The speakers will demonstrate specific<BR>
research and teaching technologies and also show how these are integrated<BR>
into a larger digital library of resources.<BR>
<BR>
While both of these projects focus on research and teaching of Tibetan<BR>
language and culture, the demonstrations will spotlight the projects'<BR>
technological infrastructure, that is, the software and digital tools<BR>
created for the projects, and not issues specific to Tibetan. These tools<BR>
are multi-lingual, not language-specific, and can be used for research and<BR>
study of any language or culture. These presentations will therefore be of<BR>
interest to all language and culture researchers and teachers, not solely<BR>
those focusing on Tibetan.<BR>
<BR>
Speaker 1: David Germano, Associate Professor at the University of<BR>
Virginia, is the Director of the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library<BR>
(www.thdl.org <http://www.thdl.org/> ) and has led projects for THDL focusing on developing new<BR>
models for teaching Tibetan language and culture and doing research with<BR>
Tibetan texts using open-source technology. THDL's new software and<BR>
pedagogical models for teaching and researching language and culture stress<BR>
the importance of incorporating video- and audio-taped natural speech<BR>
discourse into language training. To support projects using digital<BR>
technology for teaching and research on language and culture, Germano has<BR>
received several million dollars in grant funds from the U.S. National<BR>
Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, U. S.<BR>
Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the<BR>
British Academy and other sources.<BR>
<BR>
Speaker 2: Edward Garrett, Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan<BR>
University, has published on Tibetan linguistics and is involved in<BR>
computational linguistics projects focusing on enhancing linguistic<BR>
research using new technologies. His software development projects have<BR>
addressed phonetic text processing and video annotation and transcription.<BR>
He is the primary developer of the open-source language/ linguistics<BR>
software project QuillDriver, created by a team at UCLA, University of<BR>
Virginia and Eastern Michigan University, now used for research on Tibetan<BR>
and Quechua languages. QuillDriver plays video and transcript<BR>
simultaneously, scrolling through the transcript as the video plays. Users<BR>
can select transcript only, or transcript with translation. A concordancer<BR>
can search and retrieve specific passages from large sets of videos and<BR>
compile new video/transcript collections of just those passages. Garrett<BR>
is winner of a U. Chicago South Asia Language Resource Center grant for<BR>
"Multimedia Digital Textbooks for Two Dialects of Tibetan" and of a 2006-07<BR>
American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovations Fellowship, which<BR>
he is serving as an affiliate of the School of Oriental and African Studies<BR>
at the University of London.<BR>
<BR>
Presented by the Centre for the Study of Religion, with support from the<BR>
Centre for South Asian Studies, New College, the Knowledge Media Design<BR>
Institute, Project Open Source | Open Access, and the Resource Centre for<BR>
Academic Technology, as part of the U of T's Arts & Science Year of Languages.<BR>
<BR>
For more information, contact Frances Garrett, frances.garrett@utoronto.ca,<BR>
416-978-1020<BR>
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