Every year ELDP brings out the new ELDP grantees to London for a one week intensive training in theory and method in modern language documentation. This year, Vera Ferreira, Digital Archivist at ELAR, organised the annual  training in London which took place in early September. We welcomed 18 participants from all over the world who spent one week at SOAS. We were especially pleased to welcome Mikhaeel Dawoud from Northern Iraq, who is working on the documentation Modern Assyrian Language (Sorith) in Nala.

A special treat for the team and the trainees was that Professor Ulrike Mosel joined the training and taught seminars in language documentation, semantics and lexicography, and ELAN advanced searches and regular expressions. Throughout the week she supported the trainees with her vast experience in language documentation, fieldwork and lexicography and very practical invaluable tips which a long term fieldworker has under her belt.

Other seminars and lectures were run by Sophie Salffner (audio equipment and recording techniques), Rachel Watson (FLEx), Mandana Seyfeddinipur (multimodality of language use, video equipment, recording and theory, ELAN),  Vera Ferreira (video conversion and editing, ELAN, data management, metadata with CMDI Maker and Arbil, archiving with LAMUS), Peter Bouda (mobilization and use of archive materials), and Jonas Lau (ELAN-FLEx-ELAN workflow). At the end of the week-long training, ELDP held a half day of clinics to answer remaining questions and concerns of the participants.

ELDP and ELAR would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all participants and instructors at the training. We are looking forward to our continued collaboration and the next training.

by Martha Tsutsui Billins