Research and Teaching Language and Culture Using New Technologies

[Bonnie McElhinny]

These projects and technologies may be of interest to members of this list.

Bonnie

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

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