TrainingSeminars and Workshops

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 acts 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 and valuable opportunities to share ideas and information with scholars from across Japan. They have also been effective in helping field researchers gain insights and a typological perspective on patterns observed in natural language data.

Technical Workshops

The Technical Workshops focus on managing and processing linguistic data, primarily that collected through original field research.

Data management is an essential issue for field linguistics. Especially, the language data are very valuable if the language has a sufficient description or if only a small number of speakers speak it. Managing data involves multiple tasks, for example, digitizing analog audio-visual, photo, or written data, providing metadata and annotation, and converting data into a standard format (such as a Unicode font).

The workshops have introduced the use of software, 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, how to introduce and customize AAA+)
• Regular Expressions (advanced search)
• grep (search across 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 (MEIS Seminars) 　

The purpose of these seminars is to provide graduate students and young researchers who are intellectually 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.

MEIS Seminars

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

MEIS Educational Seminars

The program consists of lectures by ILCAA staff and invited lecturers, as well as 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 with a basic knowledge of their field of specialization but not majoring in Middle Eastern studies or Islam. It provides them with basic knowledge and research methods, and a forum for exchange through discussions among participants.

MEIS Research Seminars

It is intended for researchers at a more advanced level, for example, those in the doctoral program and those preparing their doctoral dissertations. This seminar doesn’t provide any lectures, but opportunities for long research presentations and thorough discussions. It is expected that participants will gain any insights into their doctoral dissertation plans and expand their knowledge through exchanges of opinions with researchers from different research fields and regions.

Since the 2006 academic year, MEIS Seminars have been recognized as credit-bearing courses for students in the Graduate School of TUFS and in other graduate schools with which TUFS has established credit transfer agreements.
Further details on the project, as well as students’ feedback and evaluations, are available at the following link (Japanese version only).

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

Ottoman Documents Seminar

This exercise-based seminar focuses on Ottoman documents and account books, examined through paleographic and archival approaches.
It is held annually over two days. Further details are provided below (Japanese only).

Ottoman Documents Seminar (Field Archiving of Memory)

Beirut Seminars

As with the MEIS Research/Educational Seminar, the Beirut Seminar is organized by ILCAA as part of Project MEIS, which was launched in 2005. The seminar is designed to promote intensive scholarly exchange among specialists in Middle Eastern and Lebanese studies, while broadly disseminating the latest research findings of young researchers based in Japan who specialize in the humanities and social sciences—such as area studies, history, anthropology, and Islamic studies—to researchers in Lebanon and other countries in the region, regardless of nationality.

Young researchers selected through an open call and dispatched to the Middle East present a 30-minute research paper in English, followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session. These sessions involve active discussion with participants and invited commentators from the host country, neighboring Middle Eastern countries, as well as Europe and the United States.

The seminar was held at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 2006 and at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beirut in 2007. Since 2008, it has been hosted at the Japanese Center for Middle Eastern Studies (JaCMES) in Beirut, Lebanon, serving as the venue for the conference “Middle Eastern Studies in Japan: The State of the Art.”

Summaries of the research presentations and Q&A sessions by participating young researchers, together with their reflections on the seminar, are presented below.

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 to provide them with opportunities to give a research presentation and develop arguments for elaborating their draft 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 speaker is accompanied by a commentator, who is selected based on the presenter’s content and provides commentary and information on the latest academic arguments, equivalent to peer review. In addition, the seminar aims to provide the participants with opportunities to expand their knowledge through listening to presentations by other young researchers in the same generation and exchanging opinions from various viewpoints. The seminar promotes interaction among researchers across affiliations and accelerates the research activities of young researchers.

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