Visualising the Acquisition of Pitjantjatjara
Academics
Rebecca Defina
School of Languages and Linguistics
Lucy Davidson
School of Languages and Linguistics
Interns
Diana Tay
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
Bronwyn Beech-Jones
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
Project description
Rebecca Defina and Lucy Davidson collected a longitudinal corpus of recordings of Pitjantjatjara speaking children interacting with their families over a 3-year period. Over the course of the project, we discovered that standard ways of managing linguistic metadata were not well suited to tracking the developmental trajectories of the focus children who appeared for various amounts of time with various groups of people in recording sessions.
Intern Diana Tay was responsible for interpreting our metadata, cleaning it, and restructuring it. The resulting metadata format is csv format compatible so that it is easily readable by a variety of systems, and yet it is also sufficiently structured to allow us to easily answer queries such as: How many hours of recording do we have for specific people? Where were particular people recorded? Who was in each recording? and How old were they at the time of each recording? We can also collect up to date information directly from transcription files to track the number of utterances we have transcribed for each participant.
Intern Bronwyn Beech Jones took on the task of thinking about how to visualise our data and particularly the social networks within our data. She used a program called KinOath to maintain the kinship information which is fundamentally important to Pitjantjatjara social life and overlaid these participant relations with a graphical representation of recorded interactions. An example is shown below with darker lines indicating more recorded interactions.
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