Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Thursday & Friday, July 26-27 - Crow RWC Workshop - Days 9-10

Things were pretty busy as we wrapped things up at the word-collection workshop, and then I was busy packing, flying back home, and digging myself out from under the pile of emails that were waiting for me my first day back in the office. So it's now Wednesday, August 1st, and I'm finally taking the time to post some details about the end of the workshop.

Day 9 (Thursday) was a bit of a disappointment in some ways, with productivity dropping off sharply in some of the word-collection groups. It seems that there was too much discussion in the groups that day, which took away valuable time that would have been better spent focusing on collecting words. About 1,250 words were added that day, bringing the 9-day total to 13,349. (In all fairness, I should note that, even with a less-productive day on Thursday, the word count for this workshop is still very much in the acceptable range. The main concern was that we might not get through all of the 1800 topics, potentially leaving certain aspects of the culture unrepresented in the dictionary that will result from our efforts here these two weeks.)

On Friday (Day 10) then, we "lit the fire" under the participants, stressing the need for speed in getting through the remaining semantic domains (topics) by the end of the day. At our location (Pryor), we even went so far as to impose a 10-minute limit per topic on each group, claiming that collecting fewer words in each domain but getting through all of them was better than working more thoroughly and leaving certain topics untouched. That strategy worked, and it was about 2pm when we finished the last topic on our part of the to-do list. The remainder of the afternoon was then spent revisiting topics that had been treated early on, in hopes of adding more vocabulary from those domains. Mammals, insects, and flowers were a few of the topics the participants were interested in looking at a second time, and we added another 75 words or so in those areas.

The four word-collection groups at the college were apparently very motivated that final day, because their productivity went from a paltry 675 words on Thursday to a voluminous 1001 on Friday, as they pushed hard to reach the lofty goal of 15,000 words by the end of the workshop. It turns out that, had they made a more reasonable effort on Thursday, we probably would have attained that mark, but the 1,651 words needed on Friday in order to reach 15,000 proved to be just a bit too tall of an order. Nevertheless, I consider the final tally of 14,863 words more than satisfactory.

I am grateful to each person who was involved in this two-week word-collection effort. It was hard work, and we encountered a number of challenging obstacles along the way, but we worked together as a group to overcome those impediments, and in the end, we achieved a great victory together.