CURRENT POSITIONS
Sr Data Manager for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL)
Responsibilities:
- Facilitate the archiving of indigenous and minority language material collected by CoEDL members and affiliates from ANU, UQ, UM and WSU, and world-wide
- Create best-practice workflows for archiving born-digital and legacy materials
- Liaise with other archives for collaboration and to advise
- Archive and curate data sets, creating appropriate metadata structures
- Facilitate the curation of rich, accessible corpora
- Collaboratively develop data access protocols
- Train researchers in data management and archiving procedures
- Project management of various collections and corpus projects
- Train, manage, and mentor support staff
- Purchase and maintain multiple computer workstations for audio-visual editing used by support staff
- Purchase and manage field recording and field safety equipment
ANU Unit Manager for the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
Responsibilities:
- Purchase and maintain computer workstations and peripherals including analogue-to-digital converters
- Maintain reel-to-reel and cassette tape decks
- Create best-practice workflows for PARADISEC
- Publish workflows
- Liaise with ANU Archives, NFSA, and NLA for collaborative projects
- Digitise audio recordings and field notes collected by researchers at ANU, create metadata records, enrich catalogue by cross-referencing audio and field notes
- Train project members and other researchers in digitization techniques, metadata management and lodgment of materials in PARADISEC
CURRENT ACTIVITIES
My current focus is on creating documentation of PARADISEC's preservation workflows. Creating public resources is paramount for providing transparency in our archiving processes and maintaining institutional knowledge. It is hoped that these technical workflows and informational documents will provide guidance for archives as well as for those wishing to preserve their cultural materials.
The following links will take you to the specific technical workflows or archiving information guides:
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Dissertation (2013): The Phonetics of tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan) Department of Linguistics, University of Washington
Abstract: This dissertation investigates acoustic properties of lexical tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa. The noteworthy mirror-image tone systems of H-marked Doig and L-marked Halfway dialects provide a unique opportunity to explore intrinsic differences in how pitch manifests in specific environments.
- Part I- Effects of various linguistic features on normalized pitch, including tone, lexical and morphological categories
- Part II- Effects of word-final glottal stops on the voice quality of preceding vowels (intensity, pitch, jitter, and spectral tilt)
- Part III- Effects of speech style on normalized pitch, specifically word lists and narratives of two speakers of the Doig dialect
Phonetics of tone in Dane-zaa
Ethno-linguistic ornithology: Documenting bird names and stories in the Morehead District, PNG
Abstract: This paper describes elicitation of ethno-ornithological information within the framework of the Nen/Kómnzo language documentation project. Sessions were engaging, natural elicitation environments for collecting hours of birdsong, speaker commentary, physical descriptions and habits of the birds. These recordings will be used for phonetic and grammatical analyses, ornithological taxonomy, and are archived in the DOBES archive within The Language Archive.
PREVIOUS LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION & ARCHIVING PROJECTS
Volkswagen & DoBeS (Documentation of Endangered Languages)
The DoBeS program was developed by the Volkswagen Foundation in order to document languages that are at risk of dying out within the next two generations.
Papua New Guinea
- Morehead Languages (Nen/Kómnzo): Two languages of Southern PNG (July 2011-June 2014)
This project delivered detailed documentation of two undescribed Papuan languages from an almost completely unknown family in Southern New Guinea, plus more basic materials on surrounding languages. The Chief Investigator was Nick Evans (
ANU). Other collaborators on this team were Jeff Segel (
University of New England), Christian D
öhler (
ANU), Chris Healey (
ANU) and Volker Gast (
Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena).
Link to Morehead Project webpage: Morehead Languages (Nen, Kómnzo)
Canada
- Beaver Project-Phase I (August 2004-July 2008) "Beaver knowledge systems: Documenting an endangered language from a place names' perspective". This phase focused on the collection of place names along with stories of culturally relevant locations and personal migration stories, allowing for the exploration of spatial expressions in the language.
- Beaver Project-Phase II (August 2008-July 2010) "Real places and virtual representation: Beaver language documentation". This phase focused on places and virtual representations.
The Chief Investigator for this project was Dagmar Jung (University of Köln). Other team members included: Gabriele Schwiertz (University of Köln), Patrick Moore (University of British Columbia), Carolina Pasamonik (University of Köln), Kate Hennessy (Simon Fraser University), and Olga Lovick (First Nations University, University of Regina).