What Should Be Done? Commentary on the 7th World Congress of Finno-Ugric Peoples

The 7th World Congress of the Finno-Ugric Peoples took place last week in Lahti. The World Congress unites the Finno-Ugric and Samoyed peoples at a joint forum, aiming to discuss the issues dealing with the preservation and reviving of the languages and cultures of these peoples, as well as issues concerning the rights of indigenous and minority peoples.

Continue reading

MAA – Nichesourcing the Textbook for the Benefit of An Art Performance

Liiketila art collective and Minority Languages Project of the National Library Finland  have launched a crowdsourcing, or perhaps even a nichesourcing task for the public, aiming to collect spoken Uralic languages to be utilized in an art performance called MAA (land, soil, nation, ground, earth, country).

Continue reading

Digitization Project of Kindred Languages goes to Helsinki Book Fair, 22-25 Oct 2015

The Helsinki Book Fair is about to begin in a week. The theme country of this year’s event is Russia, thus we wanted to highlight our services related to Russian studies and Uralic languages. Naturally, the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages will be present in this event at the National Library’s stand (6e71). Please, find here a brief summary of our programme at the Book Fair.

Continue reading

CIFU XII, Day 3

The day was dedicated to our symposium, Language Technology through Citizen Science, which was consisted of nine fine presentations, which were either (1) presenting the open-source language technological achievements and tools directed at the documentation of minority Uralic languages through the application of Citizen Science methods and crowdsourcing possibilities or (2) present and develop innovations for advancing the utilization of Citizen Science and crowdsourcing in open-source language technology.

Continue reading

CIFU XII, Day 2

What did I learn from the second day of CIFU XII? Two things at least: for a linguist layman like me, I found it interesting to follow how differently the language documentation may be defined. As a librarian, I was thrilled to see that the people in this field are taking archiving seriously. These are the topics I want to grasp in this blog entry too.

Continue reading

CIFU XII, Day 1

So, the 12th International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies has finally begun. Despite the fact that Mr. Harri Mantila implicated that the congress has become somewhat tinier than before, we are pleased to enjoy about 111 long papers and 195 presentations in 19 symposia. The CIFU XII has around 380 participants from 21 countries, so I wouldn’t consider this event as a small rendez-vous at all.

Continue reading

DH2015. Recap, Day 5

I had spent four days in DH2015 and I hadn’t really chosen the sessions as a historian or a philologist in me would have wanted. No, there wasn’t anyone in my organization, who would have prompted me to participate any precise session in particular, but when going to the conferences, I tend to attend the sessions, which could provide some new information for my home organization in return. By intention, I chose the sessions of the last day according to my own interests and finally I was picking cherries too.

Continue reading