This project supports a series of interdisciplinary Master Classes to be held as a special nonrepeating component of the 3rd International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC), to take place at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in early 2013.
The theme of the conference is "Sharing Worlds of Knowledge," which references the need of documentary linguists to be familiar with many disciplines outside of linguistics, because language encodes knowledge from all facets of life. The Master Classes will be taught by experts in a range of fields (e.g. ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, kinship systems), and are designed to give participants at the ICLDC the opportunity to learn how to document these topics.
This project will bring one plenary speaker to the conference to talk about interdisciplinary field-based documentary work; it will also sponsor six graduate students and/or nonacademic language workers to attend the 3rd ICLDC and Master Class series.
The 3rd ICLDC is a much-anticipated conference that builds on the firm foundation established by the previous two conferences in 2009 and 2011. As evidenced by its growing popularity, the biennial conference is considered by many to be the flagship meeting of the field of documentary linguistics. The Master Classes have great potential to enhance the value of language documentation by giving researchers some basic knowledge of fields outside of linguistics. Although this is just one series of classes, it builds on the growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches to language documentation. Data collected with an eye toward the needs and interests of other disciplines will be more useful to a wider academic audience in the future, may foster increased collaboration between documentary linguists and researchers in other fields, and will help preserve for language communities the cultural and procedural knowledge that is often lost when a language disappears.
The 3rd ICLDC (February 28-March 3, 2013, UHM) built on the strong momentum created at the first two conferences in 2009 and 2011. In response to requests from attendees of the 2nd ICLDC, the duration of the 3rd ICLDC was extended by a full day. The 3rd ICLDC’s theme was "Sharing Worlds of Knowledge," highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of language documentation and the many kinds of human knowledge that language workers encounter. The number of participants at the 3rd ICLDC increased by 13% over the 2nd ICLDC, with a record-breaking 439 attendees. Conference participants included university faculty, students, speaker community members, researchers, and independent scholars from 25 countries/territories: Australia, Austria, Canada, China, the Federated States of Micronesia, France, Germany, Greenland, Guam, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Trinidad & Tobago, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our Advisory Committee, consisting of 34 recognized experts in the field from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK, together with graduate linguistics students from UH, anonymously reviewed 282 abstract submissions (a 12% increase from 2011), and accepted 133 papers (for a 47% acceptance rate), resulting in a program with up to six parallel paper sessions, 30 poster presentations, 20 electronic poster presentations (a new feature added with ICLDC 3), plenaries by Nicholas Evans (Australian National University) and K?lepa Baybayan (Polynesian Voyaging Society), six Master Classes on documenting ethnobotany, ethnomusicology, folk taxonomy, kinship systems, landscape features, and oral history, and two evening receptions featuring a taiko performance on the first night and Hawaiian music on the second. The 3rd ICLDC offered a variety of additional special events before, during, and after the conference. Two free public talks, sponsored in part by UHM’s Dai Ho Chun Endowment, were given on February 27 and March 4, the days immediately preceding and following the conference. Dr. Linda Barwick (University of Sydney) spoke about cultural diversity in the temporal arts, and Dr. David Mark (State University of New York at Buffalo) spoke about the documentation of landscape features ("ethnophysiogeography") in indigenous languages. The evening before the start of the conference, two films were screened, both on topics presented during the ICLDC (Silvestre Pantaleón, produced and co-directed by Jonathan D. Amith, and M!a m gu tju, ‘we build a house’, by the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari and Ph.D student Lee Pratchett.) The producer/directors were on hand to answer questions from the audience of 80 after the screening. As for post-conference activities, each of the three previous conferences has been followed by a very popular optional field study of Hawaiian language immersion schools in Hilo. In 2011 and 2013, the Smithsonian Institution took advantage of the convergence of so many language documentation experts by holding consultation meetings directly following the close of the conferences, for their upcoming Recovering Voices exhibition. The REU extension allowed us to continue the interdisciplinary theme of the conference in a real-world linguistic archiving project, and to directly educate an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii in standards for linguistic archiving of ethnoscientific data. In the supplement, we mentored Cassandra Matson in the scanning and cataloging of more than 11,300 3"x5" index cards of flora and fauna in 21 Pacific Languages. As described in the proposal, these cards had been stored in the UH Department of Linguistics for five decades with little indication of their provenance. The undergraduate also conducted significant research into the provenance of the cards, and discovered that they were part of an early project at the University to educate Pacific field biologists in the languages and cultures of the Pacific; some of the cards were later collated into "field guides" for botanists to take with them on their research trips to Pacific Island nations. The undergraduate was trained in digital imaging, file management, the collection of OLAC-compliant metadata, and the procedures for depositing the digitized collection into Kaipuleohone, The University of Hawai‘i Digital Language Archive. In addition, the project allowed the undergraduate to travel with the PI to attend the concurrent meetings of inNET (Innovative Networking in Infrastructure for Endangered Languages) and DELAMAN (Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archiving Network) in Budapest, Hungary, in September 2014. At this conference the undergraduate gained exposure to the field of linguistic archiving (an opportunity not available to her in Hawai’i), and participated in key decision-making conversations about the future of funding for linguistic archiving. Dissemination: The cards can be viewed by the public at http://kaipuleohone.org. The PI and the undergraduate will be presenting the project at the upcoming 4th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation in February 2015. A journal article describing the project, and the discoveries about the provenance of the card collection, is also planned.
