A South Efate Dictionary

PDF of bookThis dictionary has been the product of collaborative work with a number of speakers of the language of South Efate, central Vanuatu. It is part of an ongoing project that includes the recording of stories in the language, a selection of which is produced as 'Natrauswen nig Efat'.Produced with assistance from the Australian Research Council and the Arts Faculty and School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne

Keeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Asociation of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

EOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text

One of the goals of the ARC funded Eresearch project called Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks, or simply EthnoER is to take outputs of normal linguistic analytical processes and present them online in a system we have called the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system, or EOPAS

Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.Australian Research Counci

Public access to research data in language documentation: Challenges and possible strategies

The Open Access Movement promotes free and unfettered access to research publications and, increasingly, to the primary data which underly those publications. As the field of documentary linguistics seeks to record and preserve culturally and linguistically relevant materials, the question of how openly accessible these materials should be becomes increasingly important. This paper aims to guide researchers and other stakeholders in finding an appropriate balance between accessibility and confidentiality of data, addressing community questions and legal, institutional, and intellectual issues that pose challenges to accessible dat

An ethnography of the EthnoER project

Unpublished presentation from the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork Conference at the University of Sydney, 4th December 2006PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Aboriginal language maintenance some issues and strategies

© 1988 Nicholas ThiebergerIn this dissertation I will discuss some of the issues involved in maintenance of Aboriginal languages in Australia. Chapter 1 places the movement in a historical context, establishing why there is an interest in maintaining Aboriginal languages in the 1980s. In chapter 2 I ask what language maintenance actually is. Both 'language' and 'maintenance' need to be defined, and in doing so I suggest that we need something other than a structuralist notion of language. I distinguish two uses of the term 'language maintenance': (a) the activity of a group of speakers, usually described by linguists in terms of causes of maintenance, numbers of speakers over generations and so on; and (b) maintenance as an interventional practice, the approach that is favoured in this work. I also distinguish between maintenance of indigenous languages and maintenance of immigrant languages in the Australian context. In chapter 3 I assess some arguments for language maintenance, and suggest that the strongest argument is based on social justice, with more commonly expressed arguments (e.g. that language is part of identity, that it is part of the national resources) often lacking firm ground, or else being potentially damaging. For example, if a language is equated with identity, then on what grounds do people still identify themselves with their heritage if they do not still speak that language? Chapter 4 discusses some models that have been used for language maintenance, using the term now to include language resurrection, revival, renewal and language continuation. Following these models I discuss some of the causes for language shift, suggesting that an understanding of the causes may allow us to devise more appropriate interventional strategies, some of which are discussed in chapter 4.3. Practical examples of the models and strategies of chapter 4 are included in a broader study of Aboriginal language maintenance in Western Australia in chapter 5. A brief historical sketch shows that little has been done by the colonial and state authorities to encourage the use of indigenous languages. The best examples of programmes aimed at maintaining the use of Aboriginal languages are in the community schools, and in the homelands movement, both examples relying on local community direction and involvement