Archiving – Page 4 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

ELAR cracks a ton

25 June 2012 by admin

The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS reaches an important milestone this week when our 100th deposit goes online. We will be working on a further 10 deposits and doing additional curation work on those currently online over the next two months. ELAR now has 4 terabytes (4,000 gigabytes — double that I reported in … Read more

‘e’s a diamond (jubilee) geezer, innit

6 June 2012 by admin

Most of the UK seems to have been distracted over the past few weeks (and especially over the four-day long weekend that is just now drawing to an end) by the celebrations surrounding the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Not so the hard working team at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS who … Read more

Australian Aboriginal Language Materials in ELAR

19 May 2012 by admin

If you are interested in Australian Aboriginal languages you might like to take at look at the growing number of collections of audio, video and text materials that are now available in the ELAR archive. Currently there are six online collections (comprising almost 900 file bundles) for languages from northern Australia, with one more from … Read more

ELAR update update

27 April 201226 April 2012 by admin

In the past month (since my previous update post) the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has been moving ahead with leaps and bounds. We now have 66 deposits available on our website, with six more having been added on Monday this week. There are now 41,690 files available online, amounting to 2 terabytes (2,000 … Read more

Hammers and nails

23 April 2012 by admin

Back in the old days when some of us were younger and starting out on our language documentation and description careers (for me in 1972, as described in this blog post) the world was pretty much analogue and we didn’t have digital hardware or software to think about. Back then recordings were made with reel-to-reel … Read more

The living archive of Aboriginal languages – call for expressions of interest

19 April 2012 by Jane Simpson

CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST DEVELOP A USER-FRIENDLY SEARCH INTERFACE AND TOUCHPAD APP FOR A DIGITAL ARCHIVE OF LITERATURE IN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES THE LIVING ARCHIVE PROJECT Submission date: 30 April 2012 During the era of bilingual education in the NT, books were produced in 25 Literature Production Centres in more than 16 languages. These materials … Read more

ELAR update

25 March 2012 by admin

As of this week the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) at SOAS has 52 online deposits available comprising around 51,000 files. There are 12,700 data bundles in the online collection, of which 6,000 are available to any registered user and a further 5,000 require access approval from the depositors. The number of users is now 515 … Read more

Retrofitting a collection? I’d rather not

25 March 201212 March 2012 by Nick Thieberger

I just had a visit from a student wanting to deposit a collection of recordings made in the course of PhD fieldwork in the PARADISEC archive. It is a great shame that they are only just now thinking about how to deposit this material, as it will need considerable work to make it archivable. If they had sought advice before doing all of the research (or looked at the PARADISEC page ‘Depositing with PARADISEC’, or looked at the RNLD pages, e.g, http://www.rnld.org/node/40) it would have been so much easier for all of us. Why?

The latest stats at PARADISEC

8 March 20128 March 2012 by admin

PARADISEC now holds 177 collections containing 7,516 items and 59,083 files that are 5.59 TB in size. There are 3,310 hours of audio recordings in the collection. The catalog of these collections can be viewed via the Australian National Data Service, or the Open Language Archives Community or the Virtual Language Observatory.

Since our last report, Nick Fowler-Gilmore, the Audio Preservation Officer in the Sydney office, has completed the digitisation of Calvin Roesler‘s tapes (CR1) the last of which were his 1959 recordings in Asmat. See the fieldnotes and a summary of the collection at http://www.paradisec.org.au/fieldnotes/ROES/web/ROES001.htm.

ELAR turns 50

2 March 20121 March 2012 by admin

The latest, and fiftieth, deposit to go online at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) is Trevor Johnson’s magnificent Auslan Corpus. Auslan is Australian Sign Language and the corpus consists of over 900 bundles (including over 850 video recordings) of one hundred native or near-native deaf signers filmed in pairs between mid-2004 and mid-2007 in five … Read more