State Records Office, WA

The Western Australian State Records Office has some indices online.

Ethics links

Here are a few ethics links, from Zachary Schrag’s InstitutionalReviewBlog:

• Negotiating Institutional Review Boards
• IRB ‘Mission Creep’
• Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics
• Protecting participants…
• Ideas on Fieldwork are oldies but goodies

How talking became human subjects research

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1124284

How Talking Became Human Subjects Research: The Federal Regulation of the Social Sciences, 1965-1991

Zachary M. Schrag
George Mason University
Journal of Policy History, Forthcoming

Abstract:
In universities across the United States, institutional review boards, or IRBs, claim that they have the moral and legal authority to control the work of researchers in the humanities and social sciences. While IRBs may claim powers independent of federal regulations, they invariably point to these regulations as a key source of their authority. This article draws on previously untapped manuscript materials in the National Archives to trace the history of the federal regulation of social science research. Officials raised sincere concerns about dangers to participants in social science research, especially the unwarranted invasion of privacy as a result of poorly planned survey and observational research. On the other hand, the application of the regulations to the social sciences was far less careful than was the development of guidelines for biomedical research. Regulators failed to define the problem they were trying to solve, then insisted on a protective measure borrowed from biomedical research without investigating alternatives.

Keywords: institutional review boards, human subjects, social science, sociology, anthropology, regulation

Ngarla

Ngarla Grammatical sketch, by Westerlund (Uppsala MA)

Book Launch

We had a very pleasant book launch at the Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society.

About half the papers in Morphology and Language History are on Australian languages

This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.