Bringing new life to old text collections
BA/MA thesis inspiration
Many 19th and early 20th century linguists, missionaries and ethnologists were prolific collectors of folk stories. Nowadays, the stories often lie forgotten in books journals and archives -- inaccessible for researchers and speakers of the languages. But often they are the only available texts in an underdocumented language. In my talk I hope to inspire you to bring new life to these collections.
Working with an old text collections can be your first independent language description project; for example for a BA or MA thesis project.
During my talk I will address the following questions:
- Where can I find old text collections?
- How can I use them in a BA/MA thesis project?
- How can I make them more accessible?
- What problems may I encounter?
I will show several examples of text collections and talk about my own experiences editing and (hopefully soon) publishing a Modole text collection.
Speakers
Maria Zielenbach
Maria Zielenbach studied General Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her main research...