11-736 Seminar on Endangered Languages

Instructors:
Alan W Black, Robert Frederking, Lori Levin, Laura Tomokiyo


We are pleased to announce a new seminar, being offered now, Fall 2010. The purpose of this seminar is to allow students to better understand the linguistic, social and political issues when working with language technologies for endangered languages. Often in LTI we concentrate on issues of modeling with small amounts of data, or designing optimal strategies for collecting data, but ignore many of wider practical issues that appear when working with endangered languages.

This seminar will consist of reading books and papers, and having participants give presentations; a few invited talks (e.g. from field linguists, and language advocates) will also be included. It will count for 6 units of LTI course credit. It may be possible for interested students to also carry out a related 6-unit project as a lab.

Weekly meetings will be 1.5 hours, at a time suitable for attendees; our initial [Fall 2010] meeting was 3:00-4:30pm on Tuesday, August 24, in GHC 5510.
Future [Fall 2010] class meetings will be 10:30am-noon on Tuesdays.
Grade will be based on presentations and class participation.

The announcement below lists the topics to be covered, possible guest speakers, and our initial list of possible readings.

Please contact AWB, LSL, LMT, or REF if interested, or if you have any questions.


Future [Fall 2010] class meetings will be 10:30am-noon on Tuesdays.

Updated initial announcement of class/reading list/etc: sel-announcement v2.doc

Additional possible readings:
Ong, Walter. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. Cited in Sherwani's PhD thesis.
Almasude, Amar. The New Mass Media and the Shaping of Amazigh Identity. From D. Adamson email.
Suggestions from Steven Bird

Class dates and material covered:
DateMaterialPresenter
08/24/2010Sem on ELs session 1.pptREF
08/31/2010crystal1-5.pptAWB
09/07/2010dadamson.htmldadamson
09/14/2010aasish.html aasish
09/21/2010gabeos.htmlgabeos
09/28/2010bird.htmlLSL
10/05/2010Field LinguisticsDavid Mortensen, Pitt
10/12/2010surana.html surana
10/19/2010Gigapan LMT
10/26/2010nathan.html nathan
11/02/2010dmills17.html dmills17
11/09/2010mdenkows.html mdenkows
11/16/2010levin-eamt-09.pptx LSL
11/23/2010thelinguists PBS film
11/30/2010harshit-aasish.html surana/aasish