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

Converting docx to FLEx format for dictionaries

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

Reviving dictionaries

More on the theme of refreshing existing dictionaries (discussed a few times on this blog). The Kwara’ae language of Malaita, Solomon Islands, has had various dictionaries produced over time, some handwritten (this is an image of one of these in PARADISEC), and some created using computers. In running workshops with the Kulu Languages Institute over … 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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