LSA Annual Meeting Albuquerque 2006

[Heidi Johnson]

Jeff wrote:
> I think the general topic of a tutorial for next year could be the same
> as last year's: Archiving and Linguistic Resources. However, perhaps
> rather than covering this topic generally like last year, we could
> choose a specific area to focus on.

And Baden wrote:
> IIRC, the post-LSA discussions here suggested a number of things,
> including a tutorial, some office hours, a demo etc based on this year's
> activities. I think we need to do something slightly different to this
> year, for several reasons including to differentiate it from simply being
> a repeat performance and to account for technology/tool changes, which
> impact heavily on the "advice" component of the OLAC mission.

I agree with both of you! The general topic is always pretty much
Archiving and Linguistic Resources - that's what we're about - but we
should find a different focus or slant this year AND add some features,
like OLAC office hours. I thought the idea of one-on-one counselling
for OLAC providers was a really good one. But as Jeff points out, we
don't have to reserve office hours for a long while yet.

For the tutorial, what about making it similar in length and format,
but really focussing tightly on the nitty-gritty how-to level. Like
specific advice about recording equipment and techniques and formats,
for both audio and video. (If we go this route, we have to say something
about video. People are filming - they need advice.)

And/or, we could easily spend the whole three hours on text production:
transcription, alignment, annotation, markup, formats, Unicode. We could
include databases in here, because people tend to lump them together,
probably because so many people use Shoebox for interlinearizing. A
Shoebox 5.0 / Toolbox tutorial would be well attended, I guarantee!!

I'm really coming around to Tony Woodbury's view that most field linguists
want to be told what to do and how to do it, in the tech domain at least.
And it's our job to tell them. Last year's attendance supports that. We
could be much more explicit and instructional and it would just make our
audience all the happier!

Heidi