rapidwords.net

Bissa (Barka)

Ethnocode: 
bib [Bissa]
Word collection dates: 
Monday, 9 March, 2015 to Friday, 20 March, 2015
Total days: 
10
Location: 
Garango, Burkina Faso
Total participants: 
47
Avg daily participants: 
42.0
Avg hours/day: 
5.7
Avg participant groups: 
6.0
Avg Participants per group: 
5.0
Total domains treated: 
1680
Total raw words collected: 
13802
Local context: 
The workshop was held in the town of Garango, at the Centre Polyvalent, two large rooms of which were rented for the occasion--one for the word-collection groups and one for the "administration team" (record-keeper, glossers, typists). Most participants lived in Garango, but a few commuted each day from their home village some distance away. There was a reliable supply of electricity, so typists were able to use their computers without interruption.
% Words glossed: 
90
% Words entered: 
75
Software used: 
FLEx 8.1.3

Speakers of the Barka dialect of the Bissa language view their version of the language as different enough from the Lebri dialect that they have difficulty using materials written in the other dialect. This fact has motivated them to seek to produce a dictionary that is not only bilingual (Bissa/French), but also bidialectal (including both Barka and Lebri ways of saying things--often differing only slightly one from the other, but fairly frequently being from distinct and unrelated origins).

Enthusiasm for this workshop was therefore quite high, and the participants were extraordinarily attentive to the instructions given them as to how to proceed with the word collection. Team leaders, glossers, and typists all went to great length to ensure that words were correctly categorized by semantic domain, which was good for quality control, but which caused them to progress more slowly on the tasks of glossing and data entry.

13,802 words were collected in 1,680 semantic domains during the 10 days of official word collection. The first day of the week scheduled for cleanup was used to collect words in the remaining 112 domains (all subdomains of Grammar), resulting in an additional 552 words to gloss and type. Thus, 14,354 words were collected altogether. Glossing was completed on the second day of the cleanup week, then the glossers marked corrections on a printed copy of the database contents while the typists completed the task of entering all of the data collected during the workshop. By the end of the third week, all of the words collected had been glossed, entered into the database, and uploaded to www.webonary.org (data not yet public). Corrections had been made on the printouts, but not in the database. That work was to be done by the linguist working on the language in the weeks following the workshop.