bill.journee.org

Thesis: Change of game plan

I haven’t updated my blog for a while partially because I’ve been very busy (if you’re here via Twitter, you’ll probably be laughing about now) and because I’ve actually not had much to say about my thesis. After having a quiet nervous breakdown about the quality of the data as I hinted in the last blog post, I got down to the business of trying to work with the data I had.

By and large, the quality of the photocopies themselves is fine, and I can get most if not all the typed and written notes on the page. Or at least, I can see the letters and diacritics and such to a level that means I can type the stuff out. The problem now is that since the records I’m working with in those sets of data are so old, they predate the standardization of Yanyuwa spelling and orthography. This wouldn’t be a problem if there were translations I could work with, but since I don’t speak the language I’m working on, I can’t read the stuff out to get a better sense of what’s being written, and nothing in the data matches the dictionary. In short, even though most of the data isn’t actually destroyed beyond recognition, it’s of very little interest without having a very good understanding of the language to be able to interpret just what is being done in the data.

Enter my new plan: As I’ve mentioned earlier, I intended to work with data spanning from the very beginning of study in Yanyuwa in the 60s, through to most recent data available. Since the data from the 60s through to the mid-80s is effectively useless to me, at least for the moment, I’m moving onto working with the newer data which is in the standard orthography.

At the moment, I’m working on the basis that this will be my only real source of data. Instead of looking at the data over time as was originally intended, this means that I’ll be looking at the data and comparing it to the complexity of kinship terminology found in the dictionary compiled based on all the extant data on the language. Although this is not ideal, it is a much more realistic goal than trying to learn the whole language to begin to understand the data in the early material. Either that or I have to ask John Bradley to translate large amounts of data for me, which isn’t fair on him and isn’t really moving my own research skills further in the process. If I continue working with Yanyuwa at some point in the future then as a matter of urgency I would endevour to have all of this data preserved in a standardised form, although this would involve a large amount of time and effort to do.

Until then, I’ll keep plugging away with what I’ve got.

First Hurdle: Data Archiving

Well, here I am, literally one day into my work on my thesis and I’ve hit my first hurdle: The data.

On the positive side of the equation, I don’t have to jump through the hoops of ethics clearance to get access to my data: It’s all been collected and is sitting in a locker waiting for me to use it.

The negative side comes in two parts, the short version and the long version. The short version: Some of it is unreadable.

The long version I’ll leave you to figure out yourselves from this photo I took (I’ll replace it with a scan to better illustrate the problem when I have a scan):

As you can (probably) see, the page is a photocopy of a page of written text – which in itself isn’t great but it’s not the end of the world – what is definitely a problem is the fact that there should be a good deal more text on that page than is actually visible. Back behind the blurry smeared faded areas used to be what I can only assume was legible text, and therefore some of the original data for a language which is very quickly falling out of use is also fading from its written records.

This isn’t (by any means) the condition of the vast majority of the data I have at my disposal – only the earliest data is kept in solely written form, the following data in much better condition and easily decipherable in the form available to me. All the original materials are kept at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), who keep a fairly comprehensive archive of language and other cultural material to save it for later use. I must admit that, given the state of the photocopies taken a number of years ago, I seriously doubt the legibility of the original documents also which have had several more years to deteriorate. For me, this is a hurdle which will relatively easily be overcome – since I’m working on an honours thesis, I can exclude a large amount of the data which is illegible because I need to exclude a lot of data in any case.

The broader issue raised, I think, is about how data is stored, archived, and duplicated. All of the data I’ll be using for my honours thesis is in paper-form, with very little available in the way of digital records on the language. This is a relic of the time in which most of the data was collected, and for that reason isn’t something that could be easily helped.

Given that these records are some of the few true records of a moribund language remaining, however, it seems that preserving such records from loss purely because of the deterioration of the original written records would be a tragedy for anybody wanting to look at the language in any additonal detail and for the Yanyuwa people who may want to work with their language in the future.

I’m not at all saying that anybody has been negligent or lazy or anything else regarding this language data – for all I know, the original transcript pages are kept digitally as images in much better shape than I have access to them in – it’s more a general observation about what could happen and the value that should be placed on these vitally important cultural records before it’s too late.