AUSTRALIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL SPECIAL RESEARCH INITIATIVES
Report on Initiative ID: SR0354738
Digital Endangered Cultural Materials Network: Working group on digital research methodologies for endangered ethnographic material of the Asia-Pacific region.
A working group made up of 26 members of the PARADISEC community applied for Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Network seed-funds funds in September 2003. The current report is provided in compliance with the funding rules and should be read in the context of a considerably shorter timeframe and smaller budget than originally envisaged.
Original proposal
“The initiative aims to develop new synergies and improved methods to record, archive and give access to endangered cultural material by bringing together practitioners in information technology, field research and regional stakeholders. Through e-publication of our workshop results, the compilation of an online resource guide and provision of working metadata model for networked digital media archives, we will promote the best existing tools and approaches for analysis of media content and develop new tools and approaches as required for practical outcomes.”
We requested funds as follows:
1) Workshops and similar meetings
PARADISEC, the Pacific And Regional Archive for DIgital Sources in Endangered Cultures, is already planning a digital audio workshop in early October (funded by the Academy of the Humanities), which will bring together technical expertise and participants from PNG, Vanuatu, NZ, Holland, UK and USA. We will introduce plans for the present initiative at this workshop, and use the seed funds to employ an administrative assistant from October to February to formalise the workshop network and to coordinate and collate its outcomes in the form of online proceedings and a programme of future activities.
2) Short-term visits and similar activities.
Participation at a networking conference of the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) in Thailand (November 5-7), a digital archiving meeting in London (DELAMAN) (November 26-28) and a lexicographic workshop in Malaysia (December), all of which will be used to develop contacts, collate information and consolidate existing relationships.
3) Bibliographic and similar studies
A research assistant will be employed to build an online resource guide on issues related to digitising of linguistic, ethnographic and musicological material on endangered cultures.
4) Preparation of the report
We propose to employ a research assistant and a programmer to develop a state-of-the-art My SQL-based website to reference online resources created during the project and to trial a networked metadata set of shared resources.
Time constraints
At the time of submitting our application in early September 2003 the ARC anticipated advising of outcomes in October 2003. Unfortunately the evaluation process took longer than the ARC had anticipated and it was not until December 12, 2003 that we found that we had received a grant of $10,000 (approximately 27% of the funds requested).
Despite the delay in advising of the outcome, the ARC did not alter the date of February 9th for providing final reports. We did not receive the funds in our account until mid-January 2004. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney in extending credit to allow us to carry out the activities we had proposed in the absence of funds promised by the ARC.
Outcomes
The funds received from the ARC were used in the following way:
1) Workshops and similar meetings
We used part of the seed-funds to peer-review selected papers from our October 2003 workshop titled "Researchers, communities, institutions and sound recordings: Research implications and feasibility of distributed digital archives for ethnographic sound material in Australia's geographic region". To do this we are using Open Conference Systems, innovative open-source software produced by the Public Knowledge Project. This review process and publication should be finalised during February 2004. The papers are available online.
2) Short-term visits.
Although invited to present at the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium conference in Bangkok in November 2003, we were unable to attend due to a lack of funds. Nevertheless a copy of our presentation were provided for the PNC conference proceedings. For similar reasons were unable to attend the DELAMAN workshop in London, but our paper was presented in our absence by a colleague from the USA. Instead, we used seed-funding to make a presentation at the eScience workshop of the 17thAsia-Pacific Advanced Network Consortium (APAN) conference in Hawaii in January 2004 (see Linda Barwick’s report).
3) Bibliographic and similar studies
We have produced an annotated set of weblinks, included with these web pages, that will continue to grow over time.
4) Preparation of the report
As part of the report we have comprehensively upgraded the PARADISEC website, but because of the reduced timeframe and budget we have not yet been able to implement the MySQL/PHP dynamic functions as originally envisaged.
Future Plans
We do not plan to proceed to submission of a full network funding application. As suggested by the ARC, PARADISEC has held discussions with two other successful seed-funding applicants, and will contribute to the Indigenous Collections and Knowledge Archives Research Network as well as the Australian e-Humanities Research Network.
