Archiving – Page 2 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Open access and intimate fieldwork

15 March 201414 March 2014 by rsinger

A report on the Linguistics in the Pub discussion Tuesday 11^th March, Prince Alfred Hotel, Grattan St, Melbourne.

This Linguistics in the Pub discussion brought together fieldworkers who do research in Indigenous Australia, Africa, South Asia, Papua New Guinea and Nepal, as well as a computational linguist who has developed software to automate language documentation. The linguists were not all Australian, in fact we were lucky to have four participants who identify as European who are living in Australia, temporarily or permanently. The linguists’ experience in language documentation ranged from between 6-30 years and between them had deposited in the digital archives: DoBeS, Paradisec and ELAR. The timeliness of this discussion is demonstrated by David Nathan’s very recent ELAC post on the same topic.

Research, records and responsibility conference: Ten years of PARADISEC

11 December 2013 by Nick Thieberger

The conference celebrating ten years of PARADISEC in early December had a suitably interdisciplinary mix of presentations. Joining in the reflection on building records of the world’s languages and cultures were musicologists, linguists, and archivists from India, Hong Kong, Poland, Canada, Alaska, Hawai’i, Australia, the UK and Russia. The range of topics covered can be seen in the program: http://paradisec.org.au/RRRProgram.html

The conference ended with a discussion of what was missing in our current tools and methods. While it is clear that linguists have done pretty well at using appropriate tools for transcribing and annotating text, and building repositories to provide long-term citation and access to the material, there is still a long way to go.

PARADISEC’s decade celebration conference

16 March 2013 by Nick Thieberger

Announcing the conference “Research, records and responsibility (RRR): Ten years of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)” Dates: 2nd-3rd December 2013 Venue: University of Melbourne, Australia Keynote speaker: Shubha Chaudhuri Associate Director General (Academic) Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology American Institute of Indian Studies Gurgaon, India For details … Read more

Digitising Mali’s cultural heritage — Simon Tanner

29 January 2013 by Nick Thieberger

Simon Tanner has a blog post on his experience of working with various manuscript collections and the tragic destruction of potentially thousands of manuscripts from the New Ahmed Baba Institute building in Mali: “I have worked with manuscripts for over 20 years now; as a librarian, academic and as a consultant helping others to digitise … Read more

Could DNA be the future of digital preservation?

24 January 2013 by Aidan Wilson

Genetic scientists in Britain overnight, have successfully demonstrated the data-storage potential of DNA, as explained in The Conversation today. In a proof-of-concept experiment, a string of DNA with a physical size around that of a grain of dust, was encoded with an MP3 file of the ‘I have a dream’ speech of Dr Martin Luther King, … Read more

Counting Collections

30 April 201329 November 2012 by Nick Thieberger

As will be clear to regular readers of this blog, we are concerned here to encourage the creation of the best possible records of small languages. Since much of this work is done by researchers (linguists, musicologists, anthropologists etc.) within academia, there needs to be a system for recognising collections of such records in themselves as academic output. This question is being discussed more widely in academia and in high-level policy documents as can be seen by the list of references given below.

The increasing importance of language documentation as a paradigm in linguistic research means that many linguists now spend substantial amounts of time preparing corpora of language data for archiving. Scholars would of course like to see appropriate recognition of such effort in various institutional contexts. Preliminary discussions between the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2011 made it clear that, although the ARC accepted that curated corpora could legitimately be seen as research output, it would be the responsibility of the ALS (or the scholarly community more generally) to establish conventions to accord scholarly credibility to such products. Here, we report on some of the activities of the authors in exploring this issue on behalf of the ALS and discuss issues in two areas: (a) what sort of process is appropriate in according some form of validation to corpora as research products, and (b) what are the appropriate criteria against which such validation should be judged?

“Scholars who use these collections are generally appreciative of the effort required to create these online resources and reluctant to criticize, but one senses that these resources will not achieve wider acceptance until they are more rigorously and systematically reviewed.” (Willett, 2004)

Announcing Paradisec’s new catalogue

24 October 2012 by Aidan Wilson

Over the last year or so, the Paradisec team, in collaboration with software developers Robot Parade, Silvia Pfeiffer and John Ferlito, have been working on the development of a replacement to our ageing catalogue and database systems and a couple of weeks ago, this work culminated in the release of the new catalogue. There are … Read more

PARADISEC’s ‘Data Seal of Approval’

19 September 201219 September 2012 by Nick Thieberger

As we approach our tenth year of operation, it is gratifying that PARADISEC has achieved this seal of approval (DSA), based on 16 criteria (listed below, and see how we meet these criteria here: https://assessment.datasealofapproval.org/assessment_75/seal/html/). We have been a five-star Open Language Archives Community repository for some time, which also means that we are one of the 1800 archives whose catalog and metadata conform to the Open Archives Initiative standards, but the DSA looks more broadly at the whole process of the repository, from accession of records, through their description and curation and to disaster management. This is important for our depositors to know as they can be sure that their research output is properly described and curated, and can be found using various search tools, including google, but more specifically the Australian National Data Service, OLAC and the WorldCat, and also the aggregated information served in the Virtual Language Observatory.

Bursting through Dawes (2)

31 August 201231 August 2012 by David Nash

Further to my last post, I’ve read on, and my disappointment has only deepened at the treatment of the Sydney Language in Ross Gibson’s 26 views of the starburst world.

Think about the notes you made when you were getting into learning an undocumented language … Imagine they get archived and in a century or two someone looks through them and tries to work out what was going on when you made the notes. With only shreds of metadata and general knowledge of the historical period to go on, the future reader makes inferences from the content. Could a cluster of words in one of your vocabulary lists point to a hunch you were checking? Or a sequence of illustrative sentences could be the skeletal narrative of a memorable experience shared with your teachers.

Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

4 July 2012 by Nick Thieberger

A two-day conference titled ‘Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures’ ran on June 29/30 in Cambridge, UK. Organised by the World Oral Literature Project, the conference brought together a range of ‘scholars, digital archivists and international organisations to share experiences of mapping ethno-linguistic diversity using interactive digital technologies.’ A discussion … Read more