In its initial year, five different week-long courses will be offered (see course descriptions below):
Participants will receive a total of 40 hours of instruction over a period of 5 days. There will be two morning and two afternoon sessions. Additional activities may take place in the evenings and one-on-one mentoring sessions with instructors will be possible in order to discuss specific questions or projects. Full attendance is expected and participants will receive certificates of completion.
This course is an introduction to language documentation, a relatively new linguistic discipline devoted to creating extensive, lasting and multipurpose records of languages, typically, those that are endangered, minority and understudied language varieties. The course covers a range of topics: issues in language endangerment, language attitudes and ideologies held by both speech communities and researchers, the importance of taking into consideration the socio-cultural context, methods and practices in data collection and data analysis, good practices in audio/video recording, various software tools for language documentation, metadata management, project planning and workflow, archiving, research ethics, the relationship between language documentation and revitalization, etc.
This course will concentrate on the methods of data gathering for the study of a particular local dialect, or hierarchically larger varieties, through direct contact with the speakers and within the framework of traditional dialectological research. Participants will learn how to work with speakers in order to record speech samples and conversations and how to use different tools to facilitate data gathering. The preparation of questionnaires, which are among the principal methods of fieldwork, in accordance with particular research goals, the transcription types as well as advantages and disadvantages of various of types of transcription for dialectal speech samples of Croatian regional varieties, and types of analysis and interpretations of the gathered dialect corpora will also be discussed. Emphasis will be placed also on documenting the current state of particular regional varieties and archiving of the speech samples in order to make them accessible to other researchers from different disciplines as well as to a wider audience. The topics of the course will be: theory and methodology of dialect speech data gathering; selection of the research topic and methods; preparation for the fieldwork; gathering dialectal speech samples (audio- and video-recording, archiving of speech samples, conversations and questionnaire responses) in line with the research goals, practical in-class work with speakers, annotation of collected speech samples (different levels of transcription).
This course is an introduction to the practical problems of everyday life of a field researcher and his/her communication with speakers and community representatives. After completing the course, the participants should be better trained to prepare field research. The main questions considered are (a) how to identify suitable tasks and questions right from the start of research, (b) how to act when the expected situation differs considerably from what is actually found in the field, (c) how to deal with disappointments and obstacles during research, and (d) how to use the collected material successfully for further processing. The lecturer has extensive experience in the field of ethnology, linguistics and Balkanology so the course includes numerous examples from Southeast Europe.
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