Report on 17th APAN (Asia Pacific Advanced Networks) meeting,

East-West Center, University of Hawai’I
Honolulu, Hawai’I, USA
25-30 January 2004

Dr Linda Barwick, Director PARADISEC (Senior Research Fellow, University of Sydney)

Linda Barwick was invited to make a presentation on ‘Largescale archives of endangered Asia-Pacific languages’ as part of the meeting of the eScience committee of APAN, meeting on 27, 29 and 30 January (see full agenda). Other presenters in this session were:

Robert Schwarzwalder, Assistant University Librarian for Library Information Technology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa Library, spoke on a number of current and planned digitization programmes at the University of Hawai’i, including the planned digitization of a large collection of published recordings of Hawai’ian music (see further comments below).

Prof. Baoping YAN, Director of the Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, discussed the GLORIAD networking project (a high-bandwidth research and education network connecting Russia, China and the USA), and the contributions of Chinese researchers to E-science.

Don Middleton, Manager of Visualization and Enabling Technologies in the Scientific Computing Division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, gave a paper on ‘Cyberinfrastructure for Earth System Modelling’.

V. Balaji, of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, discussed the Earth System Modeling Framework being developed collaboratively between a number of bodies internationally.

Christopher Elvidge, National Geophysical Data Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who convened the group and spoke on the GEO Initiative arising from the Earth Observation Summit held in 2003.

All the projects described had strong collaborative dimensions, both cross-institutionally and internationally, and as such faced similar issues of data management to those experienced by PARADISEC. As a result of discussions after this session and during the eScience Committee meeting on 30 January, it was agreed that ‘eResearch’ was a more inclusive term than ‘eScience’, and would encourage greater participation from humanities research groups such as PARADISEC.

Ethnomusicology students from the University of Hawaii Ethnomusicology Program with Linda Barwick, 1 February 2004.

On Monday 2 February, Linda held a series of meetings.

Robert Schwarzwalder, University of Hawaii Library, discussed opportunities for collaboration between PARADISEC and Hawaiian digital collections, including the collection of published recordings held by the library.

Brian Dietrich, who is digitising a large Pacific music collection recorded by Emeritus Professor Barbara Smith, University of Hawaii, and needed technical advice. Linda also discussed the possibility of incorporating metadata from this collection.

Staff of the Ethnomusicology Program were keen to pursue the possibility of a series of joint meetings of the research seminars of the Universities of Hawaii, Sydney and Auckland, with a Pacific music theme. It may be possible to use the Access Grid Node facilities to run these meetings, planned for March-May 2005.

J. K. Salâ, and Pu’ilani Ha’aloa of the Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai’i. This group of young researchers has recently received funding for equipment to create a digital archive of music and oral history recordings of Hawaiian music and language. Linda directed them to some of the online resources about planning such projects, and encouraged them to attend future PARADISEC workshops.