News and Events

On April 18–19, 2013, the LACOLA team co-organised the workshop ‘Place, landscape and language’ in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The event was a collaboration between two European Research Council projects: LACOLA and Human Sociality and Systems of Language Use (HSSLU), directed by Nick Enfield and hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. LACOLA research was presented in a number of talks by Felix Ahlner, Niclas Burenhult, Love Eriksen, Clair Hill, Juliette Huber, Caroline Hägerhäll, Konrad Rybka, and Åsa Sang.

On February 28, 2013, LACOLA principal investigator Niclas Burenhult presented project research at the third International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation, at University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu. His presentation – Domain-driven documentation: the case of landscape – was part of a series of invited talks sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The meeting was also attended by project collaborator David Mark, who gave two lectures on ethnophysiography as part of a Master Class series organised in connection with the conference. Several other conference talks also had landscape or place name topics, pointing to the growing interest in the field among linguists.

On May 1–4, 2012, the LACOLA project co-organised a European Science Foundation Exploratory Workshop, entitled 'Conceptualising European Landscapes Across Languages, Cultures and Disciplines' and held at the castle of Magalia, in Las Navas del Marqués, Spain. LACOLA members Felix Ahlner, Niclas Burenhult, Love Eriksen and Juliette Huber presented various aspects of project research. The workshop was co-organised with project collaborators David Mark (State University of New York at Buffalo) and Werner Kuhn (University of Münster). More information can be found here: vespucci.org/presentation-sm.

The Swedish part of the LACOLA project was featured in the local Swedish newspaper Mora Tidning, with a short description of the project. Link to the article.

On October 21, 2011, the LACOLA team tested its new Getac handheld GPS computers on landscape features and place names in Häglinge parish, central Scania. The training session was led by the team’s GIS expert Love Eriksen, and was also attended by affiliated researcher Konrad Rybka (University of Amsterdam) and software developer Peter Withers (MPI Nijmegen).

On October 4-5, 2011, the project had its first major planning get-together, attended by its staff as well as affiliated researchers Clair Hill (MPI Nijmegen and University of Leuven) and Caroline Hägerhäll and Åsa Sang (Swedish Agricultural University).

On August 3-5, 2011, the LACOLA project was visited at Lund by linguist Jeri Jaeger and ethnophysiographers David Mark and Andrew Turk. The aim of this meeting was to coordinate the project’s research agenda with the ‘Ethnophysiography’ research program established by Mark & Turk. This new branch of ethnoscience is defined by them as “the investigation (for any particular language) of categories of landscape features, especially those denoted by common words”. On the first day of the meeting the research topics of the participants were presented and discussed. The following two days were devoted to an excursion to the Bjäre peninsula and the Söderåsen ridge, northwestern Scania, for informal on-site discussions about the linguistic representation of various landscape features.