Nick Ward

From Manuscript to Machine: Advancing Access to Cultural Heritage with OCR & HTR Tools

20 June 2024 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC contains, at an informed guess, in the 10s-of-thousands of pages of handwritten notes relating to the languages and cultures of the Pacific region. Many of those pages pertain directly to audio-visual media also housed in the archive, such as audio or video files, and the pages might include transcriptions, translations, explanations, notes, etc, of … Read more

Hosting interns from Manchester Uni

30 April 2024 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC has been happy to host three student interns from University of Manchester, from February to April, 2024. The 20 day internship is part of University of Manchester’s Master of Arts programs, which we became aware of thanks to an email from University of Manchester in late 2023. Two of the students are completing the … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – December 2023

21 December 202320 December 2023 by Nick Ward

Some highlights from the second half of 2023: * We celebrated our 20th anniversary year with wonderful events at Verge Gallery (University of Sydney), in April, and then in November at University of Melbourne. For display at the parties, Julia Miller put together a great 10-minute showreel of video from the archive, it’s on Youtube … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – April 2023

11 May 202324 April 2023 by Nick Ward

Hello Pacific Archive enthusiasts! As always, it’s been a busy few months since our last update here on the ELAC blog; this our first update since we passed the mark of 200TB (now 203TB) in the archive, with 689 Collections. It only seems like a short while ago that we celebrated the 100TB milestone with … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2022

10 August 2022 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC has enjoyed an active first half of 2022. We were awarded a LIEF grant from the Australian Research Council to future-proof PARADISEC and modularise and modernise our archiving infrastructure over the two year funding period. This is, of course, excellent news for PARADISEC’s sustainability and resilience into the future. In terms of the archival collections, … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2021

1 September 2021 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC operations are proceeding relatively normally around lockdowns and working from home. The collection now houses 135 TB of records, having averaged about 102 GB per day of data added to the archive throughout 2021 so far. Continuing to dig into some figures, the 343,519 essence objects (i.e. files) have an average size of about … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – Jan 2021

19 January 2021 by Nick Ward

Well, we made it through 2020! Archiving of new material has proceeded throughout various phases of lockdowns, workings-from-home, etc. A huge thank you to all of our staff, depositors, and broader community for their flexibility and patience. We flew past the 100TB-archived milestone (for which our upcoming online conference is named, PARADISEC@100), and are now … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – May 2020

12 May 2020 by Nick Ward

Well, this has been the strangest quarter on memory, I’m sure a lot of folks can relate. All PARADISEC staff and affiliates, across our three main institutional location (Universities of Sydney & Melbourne, and ANU in Canbera) have been working at home for the past 6+ weeks. This has slowed down some aspects of our … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – Feb 2020

14 February 2020 by Nick Ward

We had a busy 2019, and are continuing that trend into 2020. The archive now houses 541 collections, containing 27,126 items, and representing 1232 languages. We have 74.4 TB of data, of which 20.4 TB is our 11,977 hours of audio files.

PARADISEC Activity Update

9 May 2017 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC is steaming in to 2017, with plenty of activity across our offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

It’s been a huge year of increasing our quantity of archived material, growing 79% in 13 months since April 2016 from 14TB to 25TB, in part due to the contribution of the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language. The collection now represents 1,085 languages in nearly 153,000 files. This could be an interesting challenge we will face in the coming years – the continued growth in our requirement for digital storage space. This 11TB represents an increase to 7,150 hours of audio recordings (growth of 125% since April 2016!), with 40 new collections and nearly 2200 new items.