The first month of 2020 are over! The year is officially in full swing. Here at SADiLaR we started the year with colleagues jumping into 2020 activities by attending conferences and presenting workshops, not only in South Africa, but across the pond as well. 

We also had a busy January getting the word out there about our call for research proposals. SADiLaR is looking for the best minds when it comes to research about indigenous languages and we are hoping to attract just that by our February 16 deadline.

In February we can be looking forward to International Mother Language Day, as well as the Year of Indigenous Language Celebration at NWU Mafikeng. 

We hope you all had a great January and may the rest of the year just build on the positive start of 2020.

Warm Regards

The Communication Team

Winter school at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam

Sadilar researcher, Benito Trollip attended a course on using Python to automatically analyse content/text in January. He was one of about 27 participants and the only linguist, which made the week’s discussions extremely interesting as discussions about the ambiguity of language was of interest to everyone. Here is some of his experiences: “Everyone who attended had limited exposure to Python, so we shared a lot of the same struggles and could learn together. The woman who sat next to me most days was a civil engineer from the Netherlands and the one who sat across from me was a geneticist from Denmark. I can honestly say that I learned a lot from the winter school, sometimes just hearing about the possibilities of NLP for research and how programming is 90% googling errors made me feel more comfortable to continue learning.”

USAN Conference for young research in Stellenbosch at the Stellenbosch University:

As a representative of SADiLaR, Benito Trollip also had the opportunity to attend and speak at the USAN Conference in Stellenbosch from 22-24 January. The conference is aimed at young academics (from honours to PhD) and started with a session by professor Pieter Fourie on what to do if you don’t want to get published. “I was impressed and intrigued by the talks I attended – the research that young researchers are doing is extremely exciting!” He engaged a lot of the conference attendees regarding their data and the possibility of sharing it via SADiLaR’s repository. “My feeling was that not all the participants were comfortable talking about their data or the possibility of their data being copyright protected.” His takeaway from the conference is that there is still work to do regarding talking to researchers about data ownership, data distribution and data use.

Other January News