Nick Thieberger set up the Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in the late 1980s, then worked at AIATSIS on developing the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive. He lived in Vanuatu for three years and wrote a grammatical description of South Efate, one of the indigenous languages of Central Vanuatu. In order to write a grammatical description of the language based on his field recordings he developed a tool (Audiamus) that allowed him to present his PhD thesis together with a DVD of example sentences and texts. Nick has a strong interest in using new tools to assist fieldworkers to produce data that can be reused in future.
- Dr. Amanda Harris
Amanda Harris is the Director of the PARADISEC Sydney Unit and Research Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Her research focuses on gender, music and cross-cultural histories. Currently, she is working on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Reclaiming Performance Under Assimilation in southeast Australia, 1935-75’
Professor Linda Barwick
Professor Linda Barwick has undertaken field research in Central and Northern Australia, Italy and the Philippines. She is a great believer in collaborative research, and enjoys working with communities and linguists to produce well-documented published recordings of sung traditions. On the academic side Linda is particularly interested in song language, musical analysis and aesthetics of non-Western song traditions, and the implications of emerging digital and networking technologies for establishing community access points to research results.
Nick Fowler-Gilmore
Since finishing his Diploma in Technical Audio Productions in 2006 Nick Fowler-Gilmore has worked at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra as an Audio Technician. While working in their Audiovisual Department preserving and digitising Indigenous audio material Nick learned the value of archives and the historical weight they hold. His position at PARADISEC is to assist in preserving and digitising the culturally significant audiovisual and written materials that are deposited in the collection and to assist with the much-needed equipment and facilities upgrade. Nick loves audio in all its forms, and preserving stories, music and historical content for future listeners and learners is a rewarding task.
Nick Ward has been working for PARADISEC since 2007. He coordinates operations in the Sydney office, works on collections, and helps manage the PARADISEC catalog. With a background in linguistics and anthropology, Nick is excited to be contributing to preservation and revitalisation of endangered languages and cultures.
Jodie Kell works at digitising and preserving media and the management of the PARADISEC catalog. She has a Diploma in Audio Engineering and is currently a doctoral student at The University of Sydney supervised by Linda Barwick. Her thesis is about the role of women in music making in the Maningrida region of Northern Australia.
Steven Gagau joined PARADISEC in mid 2017 primarily to improve the metadata of Papua New Guinea (PNG) collections at the Sydney Unit. His work has extended to Vanuatu and Solomon Islands collections as part of Melanesian culture. He provides language support and culture assistance for metadata enrichment to enhancing the knowledge and information of materials held in the PARADISEC catalogue.
Working on the preservation and archival material of indigenous people, culture and languages at PARADISEC provides that vital information resource and repository for users to access and safeguards for future generations. He has an engineering science (MSc) background and now a management practitioner. He is involved more in social sciences, education, community and humanitarian space.
Dr Payi Linda Ford has joined the PARADISEC team of Honorary Associates. Payi was educated in traditional knowledge and practices growing up with her family as a member of the Rak Mak Mak Marranunggu people of the Finniss River and Reynold River regions of the Northern Territory, and has also been educated in various mainstream Australian education institutions, receiving her PhD from Deakin University. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow in the Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University. At PARADISEC she will be working with Prof Linda Barwick and Emeritus Prof Allan Marett to develop her research project “Caring about Ceremony: Indigenous Knowledge across Boundaries of Time, Space and Society”.
Dr. Julia Colleen Miller has been working with PARADISEC since 2010. Based at ANU, Julia is the Senior Data Manager with the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and has responsibility for training and archiving materials from that project. She oversees the ANU PARADISEC digitisation unit. Her PhD was in the phonetics of tone in two dialects of Dane-zaa (Athabaskan).
Coder Extraodinaire – Dr. Marco La Rosa
Whilst completing a PhD in Computational Chemistry Marco realised his passion was building tools and technology to support the research process. After a number of years building high performance computing systems to support Chemistry and Physics research (including the the Australian ATLAS Tier 2 facility connected to CERN) Marco then held various development roles across the research and archival communities to develop dissemination and visualisation tools. His work with PARADISEC has included the development of discovery and dissemination tools to support the use and re-use of the significant collection.