Things got off to a slow start this morning, with only enough people showing up by 9:00 to form three word-collection groups. But as people trickled in over the next hour or two, we were able to get others groups up and going. By 11:45, we had six groups at work collecting words, which helped to boost our productivity. By the end of the day, we had collected 3,333 words, so we’ll be able to show significant progress in our rice fields tomorrow morning.
Looking at the statistics from the first two days, we could see that
the word-collection groups were spending too much time on each topic—so much so
that if we continued at that rate, we’d only get through about half of them! So
I gave those who were present at 9:00 am a bit of a pep talk, encouraging them
to spend less time on each domain, gathering only the words that they could
think of quite quickly and then moving on to the next one. As a result, we did
get through more semantic domains today than yesterday, so there was some
improvement. It still looks like we won’t be able to get through everything,
though, unless we can recruit more people so that we can put more than six
groups together.
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| One of the typists at work |
A highlight of the day was the visit of Rachel and Alex, linguists from
the UK researching other languages in the Casamance. They arrived in time to
attend our morning meeting, then hung around to find out more about what Rapid
Word Collection is and how it works.
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| Rachel and Alex (visiting linguists), with Tim (who works for SIL) |
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