PARADISEC – Page 6 – Endangered Languages and Cultures

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

Communicating about our work

5 February 201127 April 2007 by Jane Simpson

This week (23rd to 27th April) is Endangered Languages Week at SOAS and interestingly one of the themes that has surfaced repeatedly over the past days has been communication with the wider world about what we do as linguists, researchers and fieldworkers. Along with the stakeholders mentioned in Jane’s and my recent post, there is the general public. Many of them, from my experience, do show a keen interest in endangered languages and language documentation, especially in the ‘human side’ of the stories we have to tell. And there are various ways we can talk to them.

Modern ways for ancient words

5 February 201126 April 2007 by Nick Thieberger

This forum was held in Newcastle, Australia, 24-26 April 2007, coordinated by the Awarbukarl Cultural Resource Association (ACRA). Subtitled ‘Modern ways for ancient words’, it was organised by Daryn McKenny and his team (including Dianna Newman and Faith Baisden) who put together two and a half days of presentations on the state of ICT in Indigenous language (IL) programs. The forum had a number of sponsors, testament to Daryn’s ability to pull in support from various quarters, including DCITA, Telstra, Microsoft among others.
Representatives of language programs and language centres came from far and wide, including Townsville, Cairns, Port Hedland, Kalgoorlie, Bourke, Adelaide, Nambucca Heads, Sydney, Melbourne, Walgett, the Kimberley and New Zealand. We were given lots of information over the two days that I was there (I missed the last morning) and I’ll try to summarise it here. Apologies to anyone I’ve left out.

Paradisec News and Repository Report

5 February 201124 April 2007 by Amanda Harris

The contents of the Paradisec Digital Repository have now exceeded 3 terabytes and currently consist of 3,157 items from 43 countries in 524 languages. Since our last report in February, we have completed the digitisation of Stephen Wurm’s large collection of mainly Solomon Islands material and sent over 150 CD copies of Papua New Guinean music and language recordings to the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies for inclusion in their archive.
PARADISEC repository metrics report
generated weekly by Stuart Hungerford
at 16th April, 2007
Collections : 87 collections
Items : 3,157 items
Files : 23,286 files
Size : 3.13 TB
Time : 1633:49:40.00

PARADISEC Research Papers on Sydney eScholarship Repository

5 February 20116 March 2007 by Amanda Harris

Alongside the conference papers from Paradisec’s 2006 Conference and 2003 Workshop, the Sydney eScholarship Repository also has a section devoted to general research papers by Paradisec collaborators. In this section you can find papers on everything from the The National Recording Project for Indigenous Music in Australia to the Tuscan Maggio in Italy. Research papers … Read more

Sound files for Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork conference

5 February 201120 February 2007 by Amanda Harris

As promised in my blog last week, mp3s have now been uploaded to the Sydney eScholarship Repository to accompany the papers that had already been published there from the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork Conference.

Papers from Paradisec’s 2003 Workshop now on Sydney eScholarship Repository

5 February 201113 February 2007 by Amanda Harris

Most of you who have been keeping an eye on this blog for a while will know about the conference organised by Paradisec last year on Sustainable data from digital fieldwork, but you might not know about its predecessor in 2003, Paradisec’s inaugural workshop, Researchers, communities, institutions and sound recordings. The papers from this workshop, along with those from the 2006 conference, have now been made available online through the Sydney eScholarship Repository.

Suzzy Data Workshop – Guest blogger Bruce Birch

5 February 201111 December 2006 by admin

Dear ELAN Workshop attendees, and anyone who might find this of interest,
There were a few loose ends left at the end of the ELAN workshop last week. I’d particularly like to address one, the question as to whether we should aim for a standard set of ELAN templates which everyone uses.