The Trans-Saharan Book Trade: Manuscript Culture, Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, edited by Graziano Krätli and Ghislaine Lydon

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Problems and opportunities of applying data-& audio-mining techniques to ethnic music

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Historical sources of ethnomusicology in contemporary debate

This anthology concerns traditional music and archives, and discusses their relationship as seen from historical and epistemological perspectives. Music recordings on wax cylinders, 78 records or magnetic tape, made in the first half of the 20th century, are regarded today as valuable sources for understanding musical processes in their social dimension and as unique cultural heritage. Most of these historical sound recordings are preserved in sound archives, now increasingly accessible in digital formats. Written by renowned experts, the articles here focus on archives, individual and collective memory, and heritage as today’s recreation of the past. Contributors discuss the role of historical sources of traditional music in contemporary research based on examples from music cultures in West Africa, Scandinavia, Turkey, and Portugal, among others. The book will appeal to musicologists and cultural anthropologists, as well as historians and sociologists, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with sound archives, libraries, universities and cultural institutions dedicated to traditional music

TwiGrad: An ASR-based application for learning Twi

Applied project submitted to the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Ashesi University, in partial fulfillment of Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science, May 2021Language is a very important aspect of every people's culture and identity. Language is the basic human form of communication made up of various sounds and symbols that pass information from a person to another. The cultural significance of language mades it important for cultural identification and pride, hence the inability to communicate in one's language is simply a loss of part of their identity. The loss of native or heritage language is a problem most common among people living in a place other than their native lands where the dominant language is different from their native language. This projects a technology-based solution aimed at the acquisition and maintenance of Twi (a Ghanaian language) among people who wish to learn the language or increase their speaking proficiency in it. The product, an ASR-based mobile application, was well received, with majority of the stakeholders expressing an 80% acceptance of the functionality and usability of the application.Ashesi Universit

Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage

As part of the UNESCO project "Establishment of a National Inventory and Electronic Database of Lithuanian Intangible Cultural Heritage" the authors, representing the EU-funded project "European Cultural Heritage Online" (ECHO) were invited to give a course in digital archiving called "Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage" in Vilnius, Lithuania, March 15 to 20, 2004. The present report summarizes very briefly the sessions given. Thereafter, the analyses of the state of the digitization work of the participating institutes and recommendations for the future are given in a dedicated, stand-alone section

Time and the Bibliographer: A Meditation on the Spirit of Book Studies

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with the methods and motivating concerns of Indigenous studies. The study of books has often functioned within a colonialist set of assumptions about its means and its ends, but at the same time, having been at times in something of a marginalized position themselves in their professions, its practitioners have developed unique tools, passions, and intellectual focuses with decolonial potential. That unusual “spirit”, in dialogue with Native people and Indigenous ideas — about media, about what constitutes a “process”, and about the historical and political meanings of recorded forms — may be key to transforming the imagination of the study of books and to enriching its place in the world

Not just paper: enhancement of archive cultural heritage

Oral archives and digital technologies have gone hand-in-hand for a very long time. Both sides benefit from this interdisciplinary junction: technology enhances the preservation and diffusion of oral materials, while exploiting them to develop cutting-edge tools for their treatment. This chapter deals with an Italian instantiation of this mutual relationship: the Archivio Vi.Vo. project. Offering innovative solutions concerning metadata, audio restoration, description , and access, Archivio Vi.Vo. aims to build an online platform to host the oral archives from Tuscany. The project is powered by CLARIN-IT, which guarantees its compliance with standards and offers resources for data access and discov-erability. Archivio Vi.Vo. has not been built from scratch: it is instead a cross-fertilization of previous initiatives and research projects (e.g., the Gra.fo project). Moreover, the chapter presents the related, contemporary work of a multidisciplinary group striving to synthesize a Vademecum for future generations of oral archive researchers. Lastly, a brief list of tentative ideas for future developments of the Archivio Vi.Vo. platform will be presented

Spoken Corpora Good Practice Guide 2006

International audienceThere is currently a vast amount of fundamental or applied research, which is based on the exploitation of oral corpora (organized recorded collections of oral and multimodal language productions). Created as a result of linguists becoming aware of the importance to ensure the durability of sources and a diversified access to the oral documents they produce, this Guide to good practice mainly deals with “oral corpora”, created for and used by linguists. But the questions raised by the creation and documentary exploitation of these corpora can be found in numerous disciplines: ethnology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, demography, oral history notably use oral surveys, testimonies, interviews, life stories. Based on a linguistic approach, this Guide also touches on the preoccupations of other researchers who use oral corpora (for example in the field of speech synthesis and recognition), even if their specific needs aren’t consistently dealt with in the present document