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Information Technologies and Indigenous Communities

Workshops 1 & 6: Lecture Theatre 1, ANU School of Music

9-10:30am: W1. I-Tracker Workshop: Collection and using geospacial field data with cybertracker

Convenor: Micha Jackson, I-Tracker

This workshop will focus on the practical components of NAILSMA’s I-Tracker project. It will demonstrate how field data is collected using a customised ‘application’ created with CyberTracker software and coupled with highly a ruggedized Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). It will also provide an overview of the mapping and reporting capabilities of CyberTracker software.

11-12:30pm: W6. The AustKin database

Convenors: Jeanie Bell, Rachel Hendery, Harold Koch, Patrick McConvell

Tracing change in family and social organization in Indigenous Australia, using evidence from language” is a 3-year project involving participation from linguists and anthropologists in Australia and overseas. The main focus of this project is to construct a database of family and social vocabulary from Indigenous Australian languages, to let users explore the similarities and differences between kinship systems across regions and languages. We will begin by demonstrating some of the uses of the database at the present time and showing some of the difficulties involved in trying to represent kinship vocabulary in this way, as well as why we have chosen the solutions to these difficulties that we have. We will show some examples of the language data contained in the database, and some of the functions of the current interface, including the automatic “dictionaries”, language maps, and the “family tree” representations the database can generate. As one of the aims of the project is reconstructing historical change, we will show how the database can aid such reconstruction, and display historical and reconstructed links between languages. As we are currently in the final phase of the project, we are anticipating potential public uses of the database, and are soliciting input from communities and individual researchers on what interface features would be of use to them, and under what conditions we should make data available.

Please sign up for workshops at the Registration Desk, or to secure your place in advance please email your interests to publicprograms@aiatsis.gov.au.