PSA: Backup your data

Well my computer died today. As they say, it’s not a question of IF you’ll lose your data it’s a question of WHEN and HOW MUCH. Luckily, I’ve been well trained and I made regular backups and three back up drives of all my recordings, transcriptions, translations, photos, etc. I last backed up last night and I was able to grab a few transcripts that I typed before my computer really crashed. These data were irreplaceable and completely saved! However... I wasn’t regularly backing up my FLEx files which include all my text analysis and an enormous amount of work that I’ve done mostly at night the past seven weeks. I also potentially lost all the documents on my computer. So I feel like a back up queen and a total idiot at the same time. Luckily I have a back-up laptop (!) but doing my work for the evening felt like someone took my beautiful well-oiled machine and replaced it with a stick. I’ll be able to keep doing my work and an evening run persuaded me that in fact I will still do everything I had intended to do. But it’s not going to be easy. Right now my plan is to finish my work as quickly as possible and get to Australia to explore my file recovery options.

The big project I’m working on right now is a Sociolinguistic Data Sample. Over the weekend I was reading Christian Döhler’s grammar of Komnzo and chatting with Dineke Schokkin about her recent work on Idi. Dineke mentioned exploring the phonetic variable of -n dropping at the end of words, especially verbs, and she found a social correlation that younger speakers are dropping n more often than older speakers. This happens in Ende too, so to compare, I need to get recordings of as many people as possible across as many age groups as possible uttering a verb that ends with -n at least 30 times. In Döhler’s grammar I read about a sociolinguistic questionnaire or interview that he conducted with 40 people, and he included the questions. So I put two and two together, translated the questionnaire into Ende with some additional questions of my own and selected 64 people across 4 age groups and 2 genders to interview for the sample. The interview is about 50 questions long which should hopefully provide enough opportunities for each speaker to produce an n-final verb. Of course the recordings will be able to be used to explore other sociolinguistic variables too, not to mention the answers to their questions such as “What language do you dream in? Joke in? What languages do you want your children to speak? Etc.” I’m excited to hear everyone’s answers!

So the next few weeks I’m going to throw myself into this pursuit. In three days I’ve collected 14 interviews! Some have been extremely good. Paine Kurupel talked for ages about his fathers and mothers and how special they were, describing what they wore and how generous and giving they were. Some interviews have been terrible. One involved a crowd of 20 gathering to “help” an older man Giniya with his interview. The commotion from the people, the children, and the dogs (who were barking like mad and then started humping each other in the video!) was enough to make me stop the interview and nearly shout at everyone to go home. Interestingly these interviews were back to back of each other.

Anyway, I hope I get plenty more interviews like Paine’s and no more interviews like Giniya’s and I find a way to keep up my productivity with my stick of a computer until I find another way :)

Until next time,

Kate