The Tape Restorator

We wrote about dried out cassette tapes in an earlier blog post, and the problem they create for playback, screeching as they try to move through the playback machine’s mechanism and ultimately failing to play. You can hear an audio example in that post. To get the tapes into a playable form, they need to … Read more

Using Raspberry Pi in Ranongga

By guest blogger Debra McDougall I thought I’d write a short update to Nick’s post on 21 January 2024 about using the Raspberry Pi to return legacy recordings to people in Ranongga, Solomon Islands. These recordings were digitised in 2019-2020 with the support of an ELDP Legacy Materials Grant (0609), a project led by myself and … Read more

Elan file viewer

We were sent a set of Elan files to add to the PARADISEC collection. It is hard to know what is in each Elan file in a large set without opening them to view the contents. We made the Elan file viewer to deal with this issue. You can select a folder of .eaf files … Read more

Grammars from archival records

Congratulations to Katie Bicevskis who presented her PhD completion talk last Friday. The PhD thesis is a grammar of Marri Ngarr, an Indigenous language from the Northern Territory, one of what are known as the Daly languages (https://dalylanguages.org/view_language.php?id=10). It has few speakers today, as most Marri Ngarr people now speak Murrinhpatha as a first language. … Read more

Yapese recordings

Yap is one of four states of the Federated States of Micronesia, a small nation of some 12,000 people in the western Pacific. Like most Pacific languages, the language is Austronesian, and, like most of the hundreds of languages spoken in the Pacific, there are few recordings available in this language (see the OLAC listing … Read more

Linda Barwick AM FAHA

Congratulations to Emeritus Professor Linda Barwick AM FAHA, on being honoured with an Order of Australia (Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia). Excellent recognition for her “significant service to the preservation and digitisation of cultural heritage recordings.” Linda is the founder of PARADISEC, and led it for most of its … 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