October 2020: Talk at Berkeley
On October 28, I presented an invited talk at Berkeley Linguistics’ Fieldwork Forum. The talk was titled “Fieldwork on Language in Social Interaction.”
The abstract:
This talk discusses how fieldworkers can collect data about language use in conversation and other forms of informal social interaction. First, I motivate the discussion by showing how data from conversation can be transformative for both linguistic analysis and language reclamation. Second, I consider some of the challenges — technical, institutional, and (inter)personal — which can prevent fieldworkers from collecting this form of data. Last, I present strategies for troubleshooting these challenges, including a workflow for collecting and processing high-quality conversational data using common documentation tools. I illustrate the talk with successes and failures from my own fieldwork with speakers of Ticuna, an Indigenous Amazonian language.
