fredag den 3. februar 2012

Auto documentation

The Documentation of Tol project is moving forward and the latest development has been my teaching a person from San Juan who is one of the few speakers who writes the language, to use the linguistic annotation program ELAN! This means that he is now able to transcribe, translate and annotate recordings on his own while I continue to make headway with the other speaker who has been working with me all along. This means that we are now 3 team members and more importantly, it means that we will be recording more and annotating more all of which adds value to the growing corpus of spoken Tol. Also, it is my intention that both Federico and Aurelio, who is our new guy on the team, will shortly learn how to operate the video and audio equipment to allow them to go out and make recorings on their own - I think such recordings will have several advantages over ones where I choose what to record and where I am present at the beginning and end of the recording. First of all, the community members know best what might be interesting elements of their culture / community life to document and they have much more easy access to all sorts of situations, and secondly we have the ever nagging observers dilemma where the social scientist sets out to document / observe a culture or language and for that reason needs to be present, but while doing this alters the situation by his mere presence. Of course this cannot be eliminated just by letting community members do the recording, since it is not normal for Tolpan people (or for ANYBODY?!) to go around asking for permission to film each other, but at least it may diminish these distorting effects. It would be great if we could get to a point where Aurelio (who is also one of the only Tol speakers who knows how to operate a PC) could run the entire gamut of documentation activities from recording, file compression, meta data recording, annotation and archiving, however Im afraid the time will not be sufficient for that this time around, and another issue is the lack of funding for future documentary activities once the current project terminates in late March of this year.

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Centro comunal

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