TrainingSeminars

Field Linguistics Workshops

ILCAA conducts various workshops on field linguistics, especially for young researchers such as graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, as part of its training program for researchers.

ILCAA has been offering language training programs in various languages of Asia and Africa since it started its language training program in 1967.ILCAA has produced a number of graduates who have gone on to work at universities and research institutes and become specialists in the Asian and African regions.

In most field linguistics workshops, each participant is asked to bring linguistic data obtained through his or her own field research. The workshop instructor not only gives advice, but also provides an opportunity for participants to share their experiences and learn from each other.

There are three major series of field linguistics workshops:

• Documentary Linguistics Workshop
  • This is a short, intensive five-day workshop and related workshops held annually.
  • They cover a variety of topics related to language documentation.
• Grammatical Studies Workshop
  • A series of workshops on various grammatical phenomena that appear in linguistic data obtained during field research.
• Technical Workshops
  • A series of technical workshops on the management and processing of linguistic data obtained in the field.

Grammatical Studies Workshops

This workshop series serves as a forum for academic exchange among junior scholars on topics in descriptive and typological linguistic research. Each workshop or seminar focuses on a particular issue in language description and crosslinguistic diversity.

The workshops provide junior scholars with unique, invaluable opportunities for exchanging ideas and information with scholars from all around Japan. They have also been effective in helping field researchers with gaining insights and a typological perspective on patterns observed in natural language data.

Technical Workshops

The Technical Workshops deal with managing and processing of linguistic data, especially those obtained through original field research.

Data management is an important issue for all field linguists, for the data are their original. In the case of languages with small number of speakers, the data are especially important, because they may be the only existing linguistic data of the language. Managing data involves multiple tasks, for example, digitizing analog audio-visual, photo, or written data, providing meta-data and annotation, converting data into standard format (such as Unicode font).

The workshops introduce the use of softwares, such as the following:

• Toolbox / Shoebox (SIL’s data management software)
• ELAN (software for adding annotation to audio-visual data)
• Text editor
• Unicode font
• Input Methods (how to input special characters, introduction and customization of AAA+)
• Regular Expressions (Advanced Search)
• grep (skewering multiple files)
• How to organize metadata (various information obtained in the field)
• Organize data using MS Excel
• Perl (String data processing by scripts), etc.

In the future, we intend to broaden the scope of “techniques” to include the skills and know-how of field research itself.

Seminars on the Middle East and Islamic Studies

The purpose of this workshop is to provide graduate students and young researchers who are intellectually and academically interested in the Middle East and the Islamic world with the latest academic information to broaden their knowledge, and to improve their presentation and discussion skills at research meetings through problem-focused research presentations. The purpose of this program is to provide graduate students and young researchers who are interested in and conducting research in this research area with the latest academic information to broaden their knowledge.

MEIS Seminars

The Seminars on the Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS) Seminars started as a part of the activities of the project MEIS in 2005.

Educational Seminars

The program consists of lectures by ILCAA staff and invited lecturers, and research presentations by students who wish to participate. The program is open to graduate students majoring in Middle Eastern studies and Islam, as well as to those who have a basic knowledge of their field of specialization but are not majoring in Middle Eastern studies or Islam, and provides them with information on basic knowledge and research methods, and a forum for exchange through discussions among the participants.

Research Seminars

It is intended for researchers at a more advanced level, i.e., those in the second semester of a graduate program (doctoral program) and those preparing their doctoral dissertations. No lectures will be given, but rather long research presentations and opportunities for thorough discussions will be provided. It is expected that participants will obtain hints for their doctoral dissertation plans and expand their knowledge through exchanges of opinions with researchers from different research fields and regions.
Unlike the annual “Education Seminar”, the “Research Seminar” is held twice a year in small groups.

Since the 2006 academic year, this program has been offered as a credit course for students who belong to the graduate school of TUFS and other graduate schools that have credit transfer agreements with TUFS.
For a more detailed explanation of this project and students’ comments and evaluations of the seminar, please see the following link. Japanese version only.

MEIS Educational Seminar (Field Archiving of Memory)
MEIS Research Seminar (Field Archiving of Memory)

Ottoman Documents Seminar

This is a seminar in the form of exercises to study Ottoman documents and account books from the perspective of paleography and archives.
The seminar is held once a year over two days. For details, please see below. Japanese version only.

Ottoman Documents Seminar (Field Archiving of Memory)

Beirut Seminars

As with the Middle East and Islamic Studies Seminar and the Educational Seminar, this is a project promoted by ILCAA as part of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Educational Project, which began in 2005. The purpose of this seminar is to provide a forum for intensive discussions among specialists in the Middle East and Lebanon, and to make the latest research results of young researchers in Japan majoring in humanities and social sciences (area studies, history, anthropology, Islamic studies, etc.) related to the Middle East widely known to researchers in Lebanon and other countries in the region, regardless of nationality. The purpose of the conference is to provide a forum for intensive discussions among experts.

Young researchers who are selected by public invitation and sent to the Middle East will present a 30-minute research report in English, followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session with participants, including commentators invited from the host country, neighboring Middle Eastern countries, or from Europe and the United States. The conference was held at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 2006 and at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beirut in 2007, and from 2008 the conference will be held at the Japanese Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Beirut, Lebanon, as the venue for the “Frontiers of Middle Eastern Studies in Japan” conference. The conference is held under the title “Middle Eastern Studies in Japan: the State of the Art” at the Japan Center for Middle Eastern Studies, a research center in Beirut, Lebanon.

Please see below for a summary of the reports and Q&A sessions of the young researchers who have participated in this meeting so far, as well as their impressions.

Beirut Seminars (Field Archiving of Memory)

Cultural/Social Anthropology Research Seminar

ILCAA offers this seminar as a training activity for young anthropologists in the Core Project (Anthropology).

Since 2011, this seminar has been held for doctoral students and young researchers specializing in cultural/social/ecological anthropology in order to provide them opportunities for paper presentations and academic arguments for the elaboration of their drafts of presentations into their doctoral theses and/or manuscripts. It has been cosponsored by ILCAA and the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology (Next-Generation Raising Seminar) since 2015.

Each presenter is accompanied with a commentator suitable for his/her presentation content, who provides comments and information on the latest academic arguments equivalent to peer review. In addition, the seminar aims at providing the participants opportunities to extend their knowledge through listening to presentations of other young researchers in the same generation and exchanging opinions with each other from various viewpoints. We expect that this seminar will promote interaction between researchers crossing the boundaries of where they belong and lead to activation of research activities of young researchers.

Cultural/Social Anthropology Research Seminar (Core Project) Anthropological Inquiry of Sociality (Only available in Japanese)