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
Following on from the work reported on two posts ago with progress on speech recognition for Bislama and Nafsan, Aso Mahmudi has now created a desktop app (called Easper – Elan Automated Speech Recognition) that takes a wav file as input, segments it, does speaker diarisation, and transcribes it, delivering an Elan file as the … 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
In 2024, I initiated the “ENB Digitisation and Preservation Project” aiming to collect old analogue tape recordings from my community in East New Britain in Papua New Guinea. As a staff member at PARADISEC, community members were approaching me to let me know they had recordings of church choir songs, gospel songs, choral music, string … 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
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
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
Yap is one of four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, a small nation of some 12,000 people in the western Pacific. Like most Pacific languages, the language is Austronesian, and, like most of the hundreds of languages spoken in the Pacific, there are few recordings available in this language (see the OLAC listing … Read more
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