Documenting Spatial Categories and Knowledge

Niclas Burenhult

Carolyn O'Meara

This workshop will provide students with the basics on how to incorporate the documentation of indigenous spatial categories and knowledge into their work. This can include place names and place narratives, landscape terminology, motion, deixis, and spatial frames of reference, among other things. We begin by discussing why documenting these categories and the associated geospatial information is an important component of language documentation projects, presenting overviews of different approaches to doing this. We also highlight the difficulties and pitfalls of such documentation. We follow up with some hands-on demonstrations of techniques and tools to implement the documentation of geospatially measurable phenomena.