The DH2015 is taking place during this week in Sydney, Australia. Digitization Project of Kindred Languages will be present here as I was enabled to have a long paper on Nichesourcing of Uralic Languages later this week. Yesterday and today, I was attending the pre-conference workshops. This is a brief summary on my experiences in three workshops.
Digitization Project of Kindred Languages will be present at the Helsinki Book Fair 2015 this autumn. The Book Fair will take place between the 22nd and 25th of October at the Expo and Convention Centre in Helsinki.
Today we are celebrating the Erzya language day. Erzya is one of the Uralic languages and it is spoken in the Republic of Mordovia in Russia.
During the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages, we have paid a special attention to the materials published in Mordvinic languages, Erzya, Moksha, Shoksha. Erzya was converted into a medium of popular education, enlightenment and dissemination of information pertinent to the developing political agenda of the Soviet state.
The first Mari language grammar book (Sochineniya) was published in Saint-Petersburg in 1775. There is no noted author straight in the book but some researchers suppose that the metropolitan Veniamin Putsek-Grigorovich who was a missionary in the region of Kazan and studied local minority nations at least partly took part in the creation of this book.
The grammar book is the monument of the written Mari and Mari language literature. At the times of 1770, the Mari people were called with Russian language name Cheremis. Mari language has two variants Hill and Meadow Mari each of them could be divided into two other dialects Eastern and North-Western.
The past two days were spent at the premises of Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies, where I participated the Big Data Approaches to Intellectual and Linguistic History Symposium. In this blog entry, I will grasp briefly some discussed topics.
The 12th Bibliotheca Baltica Symposium will be held at the Södertörn University on the 9th and 10th of October 2014. Bibliotheca Baltica, says the website, aims at uniting all types of libraries in the Baltic Sea Area in recognition of their joint responsibility to increase their efforts in preserving, developing, cataloging, publicizing, and making accessible their part of the Baltic Sea Area heritage. With 10 membering countries, I reckon, it is a beautifully formated goal for this consortium of research libraries.
The digitization of materials in Finno-Ugric languages in the national libraries operating in the Russian Federation has grown significantly during the past few years. Many Russian libraries have established their own digital collections and given the public either full or restricted access to the materials. The assumption is that the digitization and improved accessibility to Finno-Ugric materials both old and new promotes the language learning of native speakers of these languages. These Finno-Ugric languages can be thought to represent a crucial resource or the worldview of their communities, cultures and traditions – and culture, traditions and the worldview are best transmitted in free use of the native language.
I was heading to the second day of Digitisation Days full of energy. Being a father for a 6-months-old child, a long sleep at the hotel’s bed was a blessing in deed. A morning coffee with some nice bread without any interruptions made me feel like eating a forbidden fruit.
This time, the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages goes west and is attending the DATeCH 2014 conference and Digitisation Days in Madrid, 19-20 May. The Digitisation Days event is organised by IMPACT centre of competence and Succeed, both funded by European Union. Our team is attending this event in order to learn what is the current state of branch and to discuss the various aspects related to the text enhancement of digitized material. See the full programme here. You may track the comments made by the conference attendees in Twitter with the help of hashtag #digidays. This is our recap on the presentations, which took place on day 1.
Our calendars for this summer are getting fully marked. In the previous posting, I mentioned that the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages will be one of the symposium organizers at XII International Congress for Finno-Ugric Studies in 2015. And recently, we have got some more news which are keeping us as busy throughout the summer.