Following the earlier discussion of creating collections for offline delivery (particularly on Raspberry Pi), we now have a simple method that indexes a set of items from the PARADISEC collection and generates an html view, which means that files are not disconnected from the catalog in the way they were in the past. To do … Read more
This week we launched a new way of viewing the PARADISEC catalog. We have been working towards this over the past two years, basing the approach to displaying our collections and items on the PILARS principles developed by the Language Data Commons of Australia. We can now separate the original catalog from the view of … Read more
Some cassette collections we receive for digitisation are in good shape and digitisation is a relatively smooth process. Often though, this is not the case. Some collections we are currently receiving were recorded over 50 years ago, have often been sitting for years in less than ideal conditions for maintaining their quality, e.g. high humidity, … Read more
This week I received a set of six collections from Masayuki Onishi. Three were from his fieldwork, mainly in Bougainville (with Baitsi, Naasioi, and Motuna (Siwai)), two were his reworking of Douglas Oliver’s records dating back to the 1930s, one in a range of languages, and another on Siwai , and the sixth was from … Read more
We wrote about dried out cassette tapes in an earlier blog post, and the problem they create for playback, screeching as they try to move through the playback machine’s mechanism and ultimately failing to play. You can hear an audio example in that post. To get the tapes into a playable form, they need to … Read more
PARADISEC contains, at an informed guess, in the tens-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
By guest blogger Debra McDougall I thought I’d write a short update to Nick’s post on 21 January 2024 about using the Raspberry Pi to return legacy recordings to people in Ranongga, Solomon Islands. These recordings were digitised in 2019-2020 with the support of an ELDP Legacy Materials Grant (0609), a project led by myself and … Read more
Recall that we have been developing a way of returning materials from the PARADISEC collection to source communities using the Raspberry Pi (see the earlier posts here and here ) This work is predicated on our catalog writing a text file into an item’s directory, a text file that contains all the information in the … Read more
Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language. … Read more
The Solomon Islands Kulu Language Institute (KLI) organised a workshop in August this year that attracted 100 participants representing 44 languages of the Solomon Islands.
The venue was the leaf house at Saint Barnabas Anglican Cathedral Grounds, Honiara. The workshop was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, the Kulu Language Institute, the University of Melbourne, The Research Unit for Indigenous Language, and Islands Bible Ministries.
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