Linda Barwick AM FAHA

Congratulations to Emeritus Professor Linda Barwick AM FAHA, on being honoured with an Order of Australia (Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia). Excellent recognition for her “significant service to the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage recordings.” Linda is the founder of PARADISEC, and led it for most of its … Read more

True Echoes: Noise Reduction on Early Sound Recording

PARADISEC audio engineers Jodie Kell and Nick Fowler-Gilmore discuss noise and crud reduction techniques for problematic audio files PARADISEC has been collaborating with the British Library on True Echoes, a research project that is reconnecting some of the earliest sound recordings of Oceanic culture with originating communities. The recordings are from the British Library Sound … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2022

PARADISEC has enjoyed an active first half of 2022. We were awarded a LIEF grant from the Australian Research Council to future-proof PARADISEC and modularise and modernise our archiving infrastructure over the two year funding period. This is, of course, excellent news for PARADISEC’s sustainability and resilience into the future. In terms of the archival collections, … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2021

PARADISEC operations are proceeding relatively normally around lockdowns and working from home. The collection now houses 135 TB of records, having averaged about 102 GB per day of data added to the archive throughout 2021 so far. Continuing to dig into some figures, the 343,519 essence objects (i.e. files) have an average size of about … Read more

Tape gumshoe

Finding tapes that need to be digitised often involves some detective work. Recently, while waiting for a dropoff of tapes (yes, in car park 3), I mused on the noir nature of the work and came up with this vignette. Perhaps the trickiest collection I’ve dealt with was one created by Fr John Z’graggen in … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – Jan 2021

Well, we made it through 2020! Archiving of new material has proceeded throughout various phases of lockdowns, workings-from-home, etc. A huge thank you to all of our staff, depositors, and broader community for their flexibility and patience. We flew past the 100TB-archived milestone (for which our upcoming online conference is named, PARADISEC@100), and are now … Read more

From film to file: historical manuscripts released by PARADISEC

We are pleased to announce the release of a number of historical manuscripts in and about languages of the Pacific. We worked with the National Library of Australia to digitise microfilms and have now made them available as pdf files for download from our catalog. This work was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

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