International Summer School on Documentary Linguistics: Methods and Data management

College of Languages Education, Ajumako University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, July 16-29, 2017

A two-week summer school on language documentation to share and transfer knowledge and skills about the methods and practices of language documentation will be held at the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana, prior to the West African languages Congress (WALC 2017) to be held at the same venue. The school is intended for graduate students, early career researchers and linguistic faculty in West Africa and the US. The school is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF 1644439).

Topics to be covered include:

  • Introduction to documentary linguistics
  • Ethical issues in language documentation in the African context
  • Visual mode of language
  • Ethnography in documentation
  • Data gathering methods
  • Data Recording techniques
  • Audio recording
  • Video recording
  • Work flow for data management
  • Digital language archiving and principles of archiving and dissemination
  • Data processing
  • Transcription and annotation methods and tools (Transcriber, Praat, ELAN, FLEx)
  • Sketch grammars of use
  • Semantic analysis and lexicography

There are 25 participants. 5 US participants and 20 West African participants