Hello Pacific Archive enthusiasts! As always, it’s been a busy few months since our last update here on the ELAC blog; this our first update since we passed the mark of 200TB (now 203TB) in the archive, with 689 Collections. It only seems like a short while ago that we celebrated the 100TB milestone with … 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
I’ve been asked about getting audio of headwords into dictionaries a few times, so here’s a summary of how it can be done. The focus here is on getting individual audio files named as per the headword, so that they can be linked automatically in an online application. Some of this is a recap in … 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
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
In recent months three large Australian bilingual dictionaries have been published, after decades of preparation. Some of their attributes are compared in the table below.
First, consider what the three works have in common. All were begun more than half a century ago, by trained linguists in collaboration with many named native speakers of the particular language. There are many cross-references between entries, and there is extensive use of example sentences to illustrate senses.
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 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
A dried out audio cassette can’t be played. Cassettes that are stored in dry places lose the lubricant that allowed the tape to run over the playback heads. We have had several cassettes that were seemingly unplayable, and caused screeching noises you can hear in the room as the tape is played, and also on … Read more
Following the previous blog post I had requests for more detail on how to convert a word-processor dictionary into the format needed to put the text into the software Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). I’ll set out the steps below, but it does require some knowledge of regular expressions that I’ll explain as I go (you … Read more
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