August 19: Day 3 of Word Collection

Wednesday’s highlights:
My clothes are now dry. Our word-collection teams have caught on quite well as to what they are supposed to be doing and how, so they were extremely productive today—so much so that the glossers now have a significant backlog. The typists have been able to keep up with the pace that the glossers are setting. I was able to back up all of the typed data to the internet this evening. Read on for more details.

I spread my still-damp clothes out on my bed this morning after I got up, then aimed the floor fan at them so that it would blow on the clothes once the electricity came on. That did the trick. When I checked on them during our lunch break, I was able to fold them all up and put them away. I should only have to go through that wash-and-dry cycle once more before packing my trunk on Monday for the trip back home.

All of the workshop participants gathered at 9:00 this morning to hear how they had done yesterday. I had challenged them to aim for 1500 words and maybe even stretch to reach 2000, so they were all very happy to see that they had achieved 1800+ for the day. Two of the six word-collection groups were singled out for their part in that achievement—one for collecting nearly 1/3 of the words by themselves and the other for averaging the largest number of words collected per topic. Someone from the highly productive group was asked to tell the others what they were doing so that others could imitate their technique.

By the end of today’s effort, it was clear that all of the groups have matured in their understanding of how the process is supposed to work. The least productive of the six groups collected 270 words today. Yesterday, that number represented the output at the middle of the pack, and on Monday, none of the groups collected that many. So there is definite improvement! They collected well over 2,000 words today and now have a three-day total of nearly 5,000. They’re halfway to their goal in terms of words collected, with only 30% of the time and domains gone. At this rate, they will top 15,000 words by the end of the two weeks.

The side-effect of such a high level of productivity is that the glossers (those adding the English equivalent for each word) are unable to keep pace. So we’re thinking about what we can do to address that issue. We have four typists now, and they are so far able to keep up with the output from the glossers. However, we had a couple of scares where the computer program gave us an error message and I thought we were going to lose data that had been typed, but in the end, it was all there. This evening, I was finally able to back everything up to an SIL-managed server on the internet. We plan to do that each evening, so that we have a copy off-site in case something catastrophic happens to our computers (not likely, but rather safe than sorry).