To continue with the Autumn Recap part 1, here is the rest of what we’ve been up to here at ELAR, ELDP & SWLI over the past few months!

From the end of September until the 5th October, ELDP Archive Support and Development Officer Vera Ferreira joined with ELDP Grantee Alex Garcia and Chouette Films team Anna & Remi Sowa to train participants on language documentation as part of the VLACH Training, and the feedback showed that it was really successful. With training on metadata creation, project management, file editing and transcribing & translating, Vera along with the rest of the team supported a number of participants in learning how to work with their recordings and document languages effectively. To learn more about what happened at the VLACH training, you can read our blog post on it!

In October, to celebrate the UNESCO‘s International Year of Indigenous Languages 2019, the SOAS Music Department and us here at the SOAS World Language Institute organised a day-long Language & Music Symposium. With thanks to Prof. Richard Widdess, the symposium was a great day full of interesting talks (and some dancing!).

The next following Monday, the 28th October, Mandana Seyfeddinipur chaired with Dr Meera Sabaratnam the talk on ‘Decolonizing the Internet’, and evening organised by SWLI and Whose Knowledge, a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities on the internet. With speakers Siko Bouterse, Anasuya Sengupta, and Adele Vrana, they spoke of the current colonial and patriarchal issue:

‘3/4 of the online population of the world today comes from the global South – from Asia, from Africa, from Latin America. And nearly half those online are women. Yet most public and prominent knowledge online has so far been written by – and often for – white men from Europe and North America in the major colonial languages.’

On November the 12th and 13th, we helped organize the two-day workshop on ‘Persephone: the automatic phonemic transcription tool’. Hosted by Dr Nathan Hill, the first day involved interesting talks given by Dr Alexis Michaud from CNRS, Dr Hilaria Cruz from the University of Kentucky, and Dr Sandy Richie from Google, each who gave their own insight on the benefit of phonemic transcription tools and how they are currently being used. On day 2, Dr Christopher Cox from Carleton University and Dr Oliver Adams guided us through how to use Persephone on our own computers.

On the 21st November 2019, Mandana and two other members of ELAR joined Lena Herzog in Paris for a showing of her new film, ‘Last Whispers‘. The turnout was amazing! You can learn more about this film on endangered languages by clicking here.

On the 19th November 2019, Mandana Seyfeddinipur also gave a video conference on strategies for language documentation around the world at the II SEMINÁRIO DO GELCIA E II SIPLI-NORTE held at the Universidade Federal do Pará in Belém, Brazil. On the 29-30th November, at the Institute for Turcology at the Freie Universität Berlin, an international symposium on Endangered languages in Northern Asia was held at which Mandana Seyfeddinipur was the plenary speaker. Her talk was entitled “We just scratched the Surface: 16 years of supporting Endangered Languages Documentation”.

That’s all for the Autumn Recap!