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About the Book
The authors draw on experience from Africa, Europe, Asia and the Pacific to passionately convey why language and culture documentation is urgent and why working ethically is crucial. This is followed by step-by-step instructions about what to document, leading to the specifics needed for writing a documentation proposal. The book includes recommendations for equipment and software, with details about how to get archive quality recordings. Data management and preparing the corpus for archiving are thoroughly covered. The appendices include forms and summaries the reader will want to refer to often.
About the Authors
Brenda H. Boerger, received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation was a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Gypsy. She and her family lived in the Solomon Islands on and off for 20 years, where she worked in Natügu [ntu] language development and helped train national and expatriate colleagues in language development activities. Her current position is as SIL International’s Special Consultant for Language and Culture Documentation, and co-instructor of Language Documentation at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL). Brenda has twice received NEH-NSF Documenting Endangered Languages Fellowships for further documentary and descriptive work on Natügu [ntu], once in 2010 for grammar work and once in 2015 for dictionary work.
Sarah R. Moeller is a PhD student at University of Colorado. She earned her M.A. in Applied Linguistics at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics (GIAL) and subsequently worked for two years in the Caucasus Mountains as a GIAL researcher and language documentation curriculum developer. Her focus has been on best practices for archiving and she co-developed a SayMore software tutorial. She has also been an Assistant Instructor for the GIAL Language Documentation course several times.
Will Reiman has been gathering and teaching about linguistic and cultural data collections for over a decade. Experiences include media-based data collection in Mozambique, Kenya, Guinea Bissau, and Dallas, Texas, with workshops in those locations as well as Indonesia and British Columbia. He has also been co-instructor of the Language Documentation course at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics since its inception in 2009. He received his first MA, in Linguistics, from the University of Texas at Arlington, and is currently working on his second, in Information Science, at the University of North Texas.
Stephen is an independent researcher no longer directly involved with language documentation or even linguistics, but whose heart remains with those who are among their language's last speakers and their communities' last knowers. May they never be forgotten.