I briefly restarted this blog on the donosborn.wordpress.com site that I had reserved in 2008 but not used since then. This was the first post on that site, which now serves as a mirror for the blog. This post is reproduced here to keep the same content on the two sites.

In 2008-2010 I maintained a WordPress blog entitled Multidisciplinary Perspectives on my personal website, donosborn.org. This is a renewal of that effort, which covered a range of topics of personal interest, and complemented my other blog, Beyond Niamey, which focuses on African languages in the “information age.”

The original purpose was as a place to post on several areas of interest and action that were outside the scope of the Beyond Niamey blog. Ive modified these slightly (adding “food” to ag, and an additional item on planning, policy, and theoretical perspectives)’:

• Agriculture and food
• Environment and natural resource management (NRM)
• Education
• Information and communication technologies (ICT)
• Languages
• Development (international, community, and rural)
• Planning, policy, and theory

The articles posted on the original edition of the blog had the following titles, which together give an idea of the topical range I had and hope to resume:

• International Mother Language Day, 2010 (Feb. 21, 2010)
• International Decade of Languages proposed (Oct. 25, 2009)
• A Vienna bicyclist – epilogue (Oct. 24, 2009)
• International Mother Language Day 2009 concludes International Year of Langauges (Feb. 21, 2009)
• 2009 Linguapax Prize winner: Katerina Te Heikoko Mataira (Feb. 21, 2009)
• Reflections of a Vienna bicyclist (Jan. 30, 2009)
• VOA features on Lost Crops (Jan. 7, 2009)
• International Decade of Languages? (Dec. 31, 2008)
• Mass digitization and oral traditions (Jul. 26, 2008)
• Can we localize entire libraries? (Jul. 9, 2008)
• Paradigm shift on machine translation? (Jun. 30, 2008)
• Distant rumblings [on hearing of the earthquake in Chengdu while in Bamako] (May 19, 2008)
• Opening of the National Museum of Language (Apr. 30, 2008)
• “The World of Soy” due out soon (Apr. 20, 2008)
• Economics of language and the “long tail” effect – part 2 (Apr. 17, 2008) [re-upped on Beyond Niamey]
  
• Economics of language and the “long tail” effect (Apr. 10, 2008) [re-upped on Beyond Niamey]
  
• What about the “Declaration of Linguistic Rights”? (Mar. 31, 2008)
• “Lost Crops of Africa” (Mar. 7, 2008)
• 2008 Linguapax Prize winner: Neville Alexander (Mar. 1, 2008)
• 2008 Year of the Frog (Feb. 29, 2008)
• International Year of the Potato (Feb. 28, 2008)
• Reflecting on “Computing’s Final Frontier” (Feb. 26, 2008)
• International Year of Planet Earth (Feb. 24, 2008)
• International Mother Language Day & International Year of Languages (Feb. 21, 2008)
• New blog (Feb. 20, 2008)

Aside from the two on the long-tail of languages re-upped on the Beyond Niamey blog, others can be read on Archive.org (enter the site: donosborn.org/blog) the blog itself, which is back.

Present plans are to use this WordPress.com site for the time being, and maybe revert the original blog at a later time (aside from current technical issues there is the question of sustainable maintenance).

Addendum. 15 December 2015

The original Multidisciplinary Perspectives has indeed been brought back, and this site now serves as a mirror for content from it.