‘Digital Western Armenian’: Talk by Michele Sigler (Belmont, Mass.)

JULY 23, 2009 * ‘DIGITAL WESTERN ARMENIAN’: TALK BY MICHELE SIGLER. Dr. Michele Sigler, the founder and director of the Armenian Lexicon and Library Online and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, Lon-don, will give a presentation entitled “Digital Western Armenian: The Armenian Lexicon Pro-ject” at NAASR. The project’s immediate goal is to create two online resources for Western Ar-menian: a Western Armenian-English lexicon and a digital library of Western Armenian texts.  Unlike dictionaries in print, the project’s lexicon will be comprehensive, detailed, accessible, and free.  The library will likewise be free to users, and will contain digitized versions of works of Western Armenian literature.  Dr. Sigler has a Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT, where she encoun-tered a Western Armenian-speaking graduate student completely by chance.  She is inspired by the work of her advisor at MIT, Kenneth Hale, who devoted his life to endangered languages.  In addition to her research interests—syntax, morphology, and lexical semantics—Sigler is commit-ted to helping to document and revitalize Western Armenian. The event is free and open to the public. Begins at 8 p.m. at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) Center on 395 Concord Ave. in Belmont, Mass. For more information, call (617) 489-1610 or email hq@naasr.org.