EOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text

One of the goals of the ARC funded Eresearch project called Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks, or simply EthnoER is to take outputs of normal linguistic analytical processes and present them online in a system we have called the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system, or EOPAS

Encoding and presenting interlinear text using XML technologies

Interlinear text is a common presentational format for linguistic information, and its creation and management have been greatly facilitated by the development of specialised software. In earlier work we developed a four-level mode and corresponding formal specification for interlinear text. Here we describe a suitable XML representation for the model and show how it can be rendered into a variety of convenient presentational formats. We conclude by discussing architectural extensions, and application programming interface for interlinear text, and prospects for embedding the interlinear model into existing applications.10 December 200

Encoding and Presenting Interlinear Text Using XML Technologies

Interlinear text is a common presentational format for linguistic information, and its creation and management have been greatly facilitated by the development of specialised software. In earlier work we developed a four-level model and corresponding formal specification for interlinear text. Here we describe a suitable XML representation for the model and show how it can be rendered into a variety of convenient presentational formats. We conclude by discussing architectural extensions, an application programming interface for interlinear text, and prospects for embedding the interlinear model into existing applications

Variation in Vatlongos Verbal Morphosyntax : speaker communities in Southeast Ambrym and Mele Maat

This thesis examines morphosyntactic variation in an unusual sociolinguistic context in Vanuatu. Vatlongos (Oceanic, Austronesian) is spoken by communities in the southeast of Ambrym island, and by a peri-urban community near the capital city, who relocated after a volcanic explosion in the early 1950s. Within Southeast Ambrym, the thesis further distinguishes Endu from other Vatlongos-speaking villages on the basis of observed dialectal, sociolinguistic and language-contact differences, especially contact with communities and languages of Northern Ambrym. The sociolinguistic setting of Vatlongos is explored via a survey of speakers from all three communities, looking at implications for language contact, language attitudes and the vitality of Vatlongos. The verbal morphosyntax of Vatlongos is described through qualitative and quantitative analysis of a >65,000-word corpus of spontaneous and elicited texts recorded during fieldwork, paying careful attention to variation within and between speaker communities. It first outlines the syntax of simple clauses, the tense, aspect and mood categories of the language and the verbal morphology, before moving onto a description of complex verbal constructions: serial verb constructions, complex predicates, subordination and auxiliary verb constructions. Finally, the thesis examines the frequency of occurrence of these verbal constructions in spontaneous texts across the speaker communities, using chi-square tests and negative-binomial regression modelling to investigate the effects of community and other speaker-level and text-level factors: age, gender, years of education and genre. There are community level differences in the token frequency of auxiliary and serial verb constructions: lower frequency of use of these two constructions is associated with higher level of education in the Anglophone education system. Both the formal variation and the community level frequency differences are consistent with effects of language shift in Mele Maat, under heavy exposure to Bislama and English

BIM-based smart compliance checking to enhance environmental sustainability

The construction industry has been facing immense challenges to move towards more- sustainable buildings with minimum harm to the environment. The building design and construction process is conditioned by numerous sustainability regulations and assessment measures, to promote sustainable construction. These regulations are continuously expanding in their requirements, and incorporating a huge amount of data that needs to be rigorously dealt with, in order to check compliance and asses the performance Building Information Modelling (BIM) promotes the effective information and process integration across the building life-cycle and supply chain. This integration should comply with an increasingly-complex regulatory environment and statutory requirements. The aim of this thesis is to improve and facilitate the sustainability compliance checking process, by focusing on inter-operability between existing methods of compliance checking and building information modelling. This thesis presents a generic approach for BIM based compliance checking against standards and regulations, with a particular focus on sustainable design and procurement. To achieve this, a methodology has been developed to enable automated sustainability compliance checking. This involves (a) extracting regulatory requirements from sustainability-related regulations available in textual format; (b) converting these into BIM- compatible rules; (c) processing these rules through a dedicated rule-based service; and (d) performing regulatory compliance analysis underpinned by the concept of BIM. A semantic extension of the IFC (Industrial Foundation Classes) for sustainability compliance checking has been developed. The outcome of the research was implemented in the RegBIM project and is in the process of being exploited as an online service by industrial organization, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in the UK

Entanglements of digital technologies and Indigenous language work in the Northern Territory

This thesis addresses the question of what happens when digital language resources are developed and become entangled with different types of language work in Indigenous languages of Australia's Northern Territory. It explores three specific sociotechnical assemblages, defined as heterogeneous sets of social and technical resources functioning together for various purposes. The types of language work that emerged were the role of language in practices of documentation, pedagogy and identity-making. The three projects under consideration respond to different motivations: the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages is a digital archive of endangered literature in languages of the Northern Territory, motivated by a concern for the fate of materials produced in bilingual education programs in remote schools. The Digital Language Shell is a resource for developing and mobilising curricula in Indigenous languages and cultures, motivated by a need for a low-cost and low-tech template for sharing content under Indigenous authority. The Bininj Kunwok online course is a specific implementation of the Digital Language Shell, teaching an Indigenous language of West Arnhem land in a university context. Each project was created by the author working collaboratively with different teams, to support various types of language work. This PhD by publication offers a set of seven academic papers, each focusing on different aspects of the projects, and written for distinct audiences. The methods entailed iterative inquiry, as I reflected on my work as project manager in developing these digital resources, first addressing the technical and practical considerations, then through the lenses of various academic disciplines, and finally in a meta-analysis of the various heterogeneous elements that make up the research. The thesis emerges as an assemblage of heterogeneities – projects, papers, concepts, academic references, and auto-ethnographic stories – that is in itself a sociotechnical assemblage