World Oral Literature Project Workshop 2012

This practical workshop brought university-based researchers in anthropology, geography and linguistics into conversation with representatives from international agencies and organisations that aggregate and disseminate large holdings of ethnographic and linguistic data. Through brief presentations and extended discussions, participants explored innovative ways of visualising cultural and linguistic diversity and shared appropriate techniques and tools for representing endangerment, both cartographically and geospatially. Presentations were clustered into thematic panels that addressed representations of traditional knowledge in digital domains; online anthropology and digital collections; geospatial tools and community activism; speech atlases and language maps from institutional and community perspectives, and a session focussed on visualisation tools used by language archives. Alongside scholars representing leading research programmes in these fields, were colleagues from UNESCO, Ethnologue, and Alexander Street Press. The workshop opened with a lecture and exhibition by Tim Brookes of the Endangered Alphabets Project.