Vindaloo 2005

[Heidi Johnson]

I promised a report of our discussion in Cambridge,
and here it finally is. A group of us (whose names
I neglected to write down so I'm not going to list
them, for fear of forgetting someone) met in a noisy
bar and shouted our general agreement that we should
pretty do everything that we can do at LSA next year.
That will be Jan. 5-8 in Albuquerque Hyatt, New Mexico.

"Everything" means: (1) a tutorial, (2) office hours
and (3) a booth.

(1) Tutorial
Jeff Good and I submitted an abstract for another
tutorial, which has been acknowledged in positive terms.
We will have to submit a formal abstract by Sept. 1 (?).
(Someday we'll get so used to this we'll know all of
these deadlines off the top of our heads.) This one will
focus on hands-on, nitty-gritty guidance in creating
archival-quality language resources. I'm attaching that
proposal, in case some of y'all haven't seen it. We are
still trying to round up someone, preferably from UNM,
to do the video portion of this tutorial. I am tasked
with nagging Melissa Axelrod at UNM about this. They have
both documentary linguists and a big sign language 
program, so they're bound to have someone who is good
at making videos.

We're going to ask Maggie for that Thursday afternoon
time slot again, hoping for another great crowd.

(2) Office hours 
In the tutorial proposal, we said that we have OLAC
Office Hours so that people could ask more detailed
questions later, if they want. We will need to request
hours sometime in the fall: Jeff and I will keep our
eyes on that deadline. There will be a mention of our
hours in the handbook, but Doug Whalen pointed out that 
we can't predict what sort of room we'll get or really
even how much time. So, we can't assume that we can do
all the outreach we would like to do through this means.
The priorities for this time & space are, in order:
a. tutorial questions (since we said we would). This
   will be advice about making archival-quality recordings,
   texts, etc. Maybe UNICODE advice, if Deborah can come.
b. OLAC registration issues: someone like Baden or Gary
   will need to be there to answer technical questions
   about becoming a proper OLAC archive.
c. issues around access and intellectual property rights:
   helping people figure out how to talk to their consultants,
   mainly. 

Once we know a bit more about room and number of hours,
we can work on the details for this. We will definitely
need people to be in the room to answer questions. We 
probably won't know much until late November or early
December.

3. a booth in the publishers' room
This went pretty well last year, so we decided to do it
again. Last year's booth cost us $1036, distributed among
6 groups and, I think, not too painful for any one. We
can expect something similar in Albuquerque. We'll have
to pony up $600 for registration in September and then
order the furniture in December. I am tasked with finding
out if the Hyatt will have wireless access througout the
exhibit space - the one in Oakland did, so we didn't have
to pay for that. Otherwise it would have been another $800!
The Hyatt website says that meetings rooms all have Internet
access - I'll write the concierge and see if that means
wireless or what. 

Peter Ladefoged had the brilliant idea of doing a powerpoint 
slide show at the booth, which was imho the best part of the
enterprise. We must definitely do it again. I'll start
soliciting ppts in September, when people are back at school.
I just ordered a laptop projector for AILLA (spending out
a grant), so this will be easier for me than last time. 
Brochures were not a plus: there were hundreds left over.
I still have some of them (I think)... we can worry about
what to put on our table much much later. At least, and
possibly at most, a handout with lots of websites on it
(websites for all the outfits that have slides in the show,
at least.)

We can use the booth to do more "office hours". This was
considered a reasonable plan by all. We can split up the
time in large chunks, say Friday 9-12 OLAC technical questions,
Friday 1-5 CASWL ethics issues... We can figure that out
in detail later in the fall. We should definitely get this
schedule worked out well before the actual conference, so
that I can bring posters to scatter around the place advertising
our schedule. The booth was actually a pretty good place
to have conversations with people, so this year I think we
should go with smaller tables and an extra chair. 

Laura suggested that we have goodies: candy, magnets, pens,
chattering teeth with OLAC written on them... I'm not sure
what the UT accounting code for "novelties" is, but we can
definitely spring for a bowl of candy. Chocolate is a
guaranteed attractor. WALS may have a party, so we should try
to be near them. Last year being next to the poster session on
endangered languages was a big plus. 

============
Finally, we talked some about doing a course at the LSA
Institute 2007 at Stanford. This will not be an easy thing
to organize, but it would reach a fair number of linguists
and give us a chance to actually brainwash - er - teach 
them something. Proposals will be due in 2006; Jeff is 
tasked with watching out for this. The trick will be paying
travel and per diems for the teachers, since we would want
ideally several different ones. It's not impossible: if
we apply in spring 2006, we could submit a proposal to
NSF Linguistics in July 2006 (?) for funds to pay for our
instructors. If we got the grant, we would probably have
the funds in hand by March. It would not be that much money
by NSF grant standards, so odds would be good that we'd get
the bucks. The course of our dreams would be a lot of work
to organize, but probably worth it, so let's keep it in
mind and be prepared to fling abstracts together in early
2006.

This is a very long report, sorry, but it is good to have
so many irons in the fire. 

One last thing: this year at LSA, we need to meet to talk
seriously about putting together a Wiki or something, 
preferably connected with EMELD, for ongoing discussions
and counselings concerning all of our OLAC tutorial topics.

See y'all,
Heidi