January

It’s the middle of January, nearly the new moon, and a good time to reflect on what I’ve accomplished and what I’m dreaming to accomplish. 

After the big recording frenzy of the holidays, I’ve been putting most of my attention on organizing and transcribing the corpus. Partly because Limolians have been very busy the past few weeks and also because I want the corpus in archival state by the end of this summer. This has involved a number of tasks:

1. I went back through all the raw data to find recordings that didn’t make it into the database. Many of these were chance recordings of spontaneous speech or intentional recordings done by someone that wasn’t me. This resulted in 500+ unique recordings.

2. Once all the material was in, I tagged each recording for a number of characteristics to generate a file name. The language spoken, the type of speech (spoken, read, or written), whether or not it was spontaneous, prompted (by me), or elicited word for word (by me), and whether it was a narrative, song, elicitation, translation, or interactive/formal discourse. For many of these, especially the songs, I had to play them for multiple people to learn the language and style of the song.

3. Once all the files had new names, I had to go through and rename each file and all its accompanying files (like transcription files, annotation files, etc.) and rename the texts in FLEx.

4. Next, I have to go through each file and add the correct metadata, such as correct title, speaker info, and a description of the contents.

5. Finally, each recording needs to be transcribed (write down what was said), translated into English, and then interlinearized where each word in the transcription is matched with a word/meaning in the dictionary. These interlinearizations also required a large amount of standardization, since many different people and many different analyses have been applied to the texts.

It’s a lot of work and I hope to continue standardizing and enriching the corpus intensely for the rest of the month (the corpus will need constant refinement forever anyway) In February, I will turn to a more focused grammatical survey, which will be more productive after seeing so much of the data!

As a fun project, Warama and I are working on two songbooks. (There are more than 150 song recordings in the corpus!) One for church songs and one for other songs. I hope to connect the recordings to the book in some way so people can hear the songs on demand! Once school starts up, we will get some children to draw some pictures for the songbooks.

I’ll just close in saying how thankful I am for the bright, bright sun and my working solar panel than let’s me work 8+ hours a day on my laptop... 

Still running every other day, on Sunday I did a full 5k with the kids! We watched a documentary in Usain Bolt the night before so felt extra inspired :)

Kate