Linguasoft at the Conference on the Endangered Languages and Cultures of America (CELCNA 2007)

What an outstanding event! And another example how some very motivated and brilliant people can do wonders with limited funding...
I presented a paper titled “Technology: a double-edged sword for endangered languages of Native America”. The multidisciplinarity of this paper brought its share of challenges:

• talking about languages to an audience mainly consisting of Natives, expert in their language, of BA's, MA's and PhD's in linguistics (without being an academic linguist myself!);
• talking about PhD-level research in technology to the same audience, without overwhelming them with too-detailed technical information;
• in order to bring some progression in this paper, I had to start with very general data on the current status of languages before I moved on to technology... the aforementioned audience was of course well aware of most of this general data.
  

Challenges being opportunities, the audience was actually very attentive to my presentation, and I received smart questions and a very positive feedback, along with encouragements to carry on the job and come back to next year's conference...
The global climate of this conference was amazingly positive: not only during presentations, but also during social gatherings. In this three-day conference we were able to check out three restaurants (at the Brazilian Grill on the photo)... not too bad, huh???