The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork

This book offers a state-of-the-art guide to linguistic fieldwork, reflecting its collaborative nature across the subfields of linguistics and disciplines such as astronomy, anthropology, biology, musicology, and ethnography. Experienced scholars and fieldworkers explain the methods and approaches needed to understand a language in its full cultural context and to document it accessibly and enduringly. They consider the application of new technological approaches to recording and documentation, but never lose sight of the crucial relationship between subject and researcher. The book is timely: an increased awareness of dying languages and vanishing dialects has stimulated the impetus for recording them as well as the funds required to do so. The Handbook is an indispensable source, guide, and reference for everyone involved in linguistic and cultural fieldwork.

Nicholas Thieberger is a linguist who has worked with speakers of Warnman, from Western Australia and South Efate, a language from central Vanuatu. His grammar of South Efate broke new ground to include citable data linked to an archival version of the primary recordings. He is interested in developments in e-humanities methods and their potential to improve research practice, and is currently developing methods for creating reusable data sets from fieldwork on previously unrecorded languages. He is the project officer with the multi-institutional Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC.org.au), a databank that holds 3,000 hours of digitised audio files. He was an Assistant Professor in linguistics at the University of Hawai'i and is currently an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the University of Melbourne.