First of all, a note about what happened on Sunday. It turns out the Moïse
did come to pick me up that morning, but he couldn’t find me. He wasn’t aware
that I had been moved to a different room, and he didn’t have my phone number
in order to contact me that way. So we missed each other. All mysteries
regarding what happened that day are now solved.
As far as what happened today, we began the day with a meeting of the
entire group, as usual. I announced that we were on track to exceed their goal
of 13,000 words by the end of this week, since we had already collected more
than 7,000 in the first five days of the workshop. They were greatly encouraged
by this news, and there was a round of celebration. Matthieu and I went on,
however, to point out a couple examples of ways in which some of the groups had
gone astray, using up precious time writing down phrases in the language that
do not belong in a dictionary. We
encouraged the group leaders to keep in mind the principles that had been
taught during the training period, so that the typists would not have to cross
out or correct so much of the data that was submitted to them.
The mood as we broke up to begin collecting words again was a bit
subdued because of the correction that Matthieu and I felt was necessary to
bring, but the results seem to have been worth the time and effort we invested
during that meeting. Matthieu told me at the end of the day today that the
quality of the data collected today was much improved compared to Friday’s,
meaning that his job of checking the content was taking much less time. This
allowed him to keep me supplied with material to enter into the database.
We added nearly 1400 words today, including those added by the typists
to domains that had been treated less than thoroughly on Friday by the word-collection
groups. This gives us a 6-day total of 8,437 words collected. Perhaps more
important is the fact that the groups moved more quickly through the domains
they worked on today; we’ve now treated nearly 1000 of the 1800 domains. That
means that we’re still off the pace necessary in order to get through all of
the domains by the end of the week, but we’re getting closer to being able to
achieve that goal.
I’m looking forward to being able to share undiluted good news at our
group meeting tomorrow morning: good progress on the word count, improved
prognosis regarding our ability to get through all of the domains by the end of
the week, and much-improved quality in the data collected. I think this will
give everyone a boost, offsetting some of the fatigue from this marathon of
intellectual effort that is definitely making itself felt at this point.
That’s not all the good news for the day, though. We got Matthieu’s computer
configured to be able to submit data to the online dictionary site, so if you
want to have a peek at the data we’re collecting, check out http://djimini.webonary.org. Just keep
in mind that this data is very, very raw and will require a lot of cleaning up.
I’ll be helping the team get started on that task next week before I leave to
return home.
We also—with a bit of help via email from a colleague in Dallas to
solve a problem we encountered along the way—got Matthieu’s computer set up to
submit data to a website that will allow me (and other individuals who will be
helping with this dictionary from somewhere other than Dabakala) to download
the data from the team and upload contributions as necessary.
All in all, today was a very positive day in a number of ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment