PARADISEC – Page 5 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

Online interlinear text, and streaming media without Flash

19 July 20141 April 2011 by Nick Thieberger

Playing media on the web is nothing new. But playing the media that results from fieldwork, having transcripts highlighted to track timecodes in the video or audio, and having it all work without needing to install Flash or other streaming servers, this is new. So is having a path to upload from common fieldwork tools … Read more

Australian Humanities research infrastructure funding

1 April 201129 March 2011 by Nick Thieberger

All Australian humanities scholars with an interest in digital scholarship should take this brief opportunity to read and comment on the federal government’s ‘2011 Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure’ discussion paper. Why? Because the two previous ‘Roadmaps’ funded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ‘research infrastructure’, almost exclusively NOT in the Humanities, but … Read more

Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC)

5 February 201119 November 2010 by Nick Thieberger

I recently attended a symposium titled Models for capacity development in language documentation and conservation hosted by ILCAA at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. The symposium brought together a group of people involved in supporting language work in the Asia-Pacific region in various ways (see the website for a full list): academic (Institute of Linguistics, Minhsiung, Taiwan, Beijing, China, Goroka, PNG, Batchelor, Australia, Bangkok, Thailand) and community-based (Manokwari, West-Papua; Tshanglalo, Bhutan; Bhasha Research Centre and Adivasi Academy, Gudjarat, India; Miromaa, Australia), using film (Sorosoro, France), or archiving language records (PARADISEC). The aim of the meeting was to build a network that would continue to link between training activities to support language work, the Consortium on Training in Language Documentation and Conservation (CTLDC), whose planning group members are listed here.

How can we get the material we have used in our research back to the people we recorded?

25 November 201424 March 2010 by Nick Thieberger

Every time I revisited my fieldsite I was asked for copies of photos or recordings and I wanted some way that these could be accessed without me having to be present. When I started visiting Erakor village in central Vanuatu there was intermittent electricity available, usually only in the evenings in the house I lived in.

How to import a basic transcript into ELAN

5 February 201129 November 2008 by admin

The problem: you have text files and audio files, but the text files are not aligned to the audio files.
I imagine there are a few readers out there who have transcriptions of audio files that never made it past an utterance per line text file. This is a post for you, if you’d like to know how to import and time-align those files in ELAN.

The Growing PARADISEC Collection

5 February 20117 July 2008 by Amanda Harris

Following on from Aidan’s blog last week announcing that PARADISEC‘s archive has reached 2000 hours of recordings, here is some of the detail about what’s in our digital archive. Along with Mark Durie’s collection from Aceh, described in the last post, are other collections from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, the Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kiribati, Korea, Lao, Malaysia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Norfolk Island, Palau, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Reunion, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Vietnam, and Wallis and Futuna.

Renovations, Repairs and Repositories

5 February 201111 March 2008 by Aidan Wilson

A lot of work has been happening at the University of Sydney over the past six months, and at the end of last year the top floor of the Transient Building, which houses Linguistics, Paradisec and a few other offices, got renovated. Unfortunately, since the entire exterior of the building is composed of fibrous asbestos, it’s unlikely that the University will outlay the mammoth insurance costs to do any exterior work. But anyone who knows the Transient building knows that the best option would be to demolish the whole thing and start again from scratch.

A huge loss

5 February 201128 July 2007 by admin

Australia recently lost another of its national treasures. Paddy Bedford was one of the prodigeously talented Gija artists of the East Kimberley. He was doubtlessly one one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. You can read obituaries here and here (WARNING: Photo) and see for yourself the wonderful legacy he has left … Read more

‘Baking Tapes’ or Analogue Audio Restoration

5 February 201114 May 2007 by Aidan Wilson

Last Friday was a bit of a milestone for me, since, in the 6 or so months that I have been involved in the audio preservation side of things at PARADISEC, I hadn’t yet actually cleaned a damaged audio tape. Unfortunately for me, the process isn’t quite as straight-forward as it is for a CD – warm soapy water, a non-abrasive cloth, wipe across the grain – rather, the entire process can take weeks, depending on how badly affected the tapes are.

Paradisec’s PNG Music recordings and the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies

5 February 20112 May 2007 by Amanda Harris

Several PNG newspapers have recently been reporting on the exchange of PNG music recordings between Paradisec and the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. One article in the National Weekender is already available online, and we’ll put a copy of the other one up on our website when we get a hold of it. “Institute … Read more