Endangered Languages and Cultures

Dessicated history can be rehydrated!

7 March 2022 by Nick Thieberger

A dried out audio cassette can’t be played. Cassettes that are stored in dry places lose the lubricant that allowed the tape to run over the playback heads. We have had several cassettes that were seemingly unplayable, and caused screeching noises you can hear in the room as the tape is played, and also on … Read more

Converting docx to FLEx format for dictionaries

29 October 202129 October 2021 by Nick Thieberger

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

Reviving dictionaries

29 October 202110 October 2021 by Nick Thieberger

More on the theme of refreshing existing dictionaries (discussed a few times on this blog). The Kwara’ae language of Malaita, Solomon Islands, has had various dictionaries produced over time, some handwritten (this is an image of one of these in PARADISEC), and some created using computers. In running workshops with the Kulu Languages Institute over … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – August 2021

1 September 2021 by Nick Ward

PARADISEC operations are proceeding relatively normally around lockdowns and working from home. The collection now houses 135 TB of records, having averaged about 102 GB per day of data added to the archive throughout 2021 so far. Continuing to dig into some figures, the 343,519 essence objects (i.e. files) have an average size of about … Read more

Tape gumshoe

20 April 2021 by Nick Thieberger

Finding tapes that need to be digitised often involves some detective work. Recently, while waiting for a dropoff of tapes (yes, in car park 3), I mused on the noir nature of the work and came up with this vignette. Perhaps the trickiest collection I’ve dealt with was one created by Fr John Z’graggen in … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – Jan 2021

19 January 2021 by Nick Ward

Well, we made it through 2020! Archiving of new material has proceeded throughout various phases of lockdowns, workings-from-home, etc. A huge thank you to all of our staff, depositors, and broader community for their flexibility and patience. We flew past the 100TB-archived milestone (for which our upcoming online conference is named, PARADISEC@100), and are now … Read more

From film to file: historical manuscripts released by PARADISEC

9 December 20208 December 2020 by Nick Thieberger

We are pleased to announce the release of a number of historical manuscripts in and about languages of the Pacific. We worked with the National Library of Australia to digitise microfilms and have now made them available as pdf files for download from our catalog. This work was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language

PARADISEC Activity Update – May 2020

12 May 2020 by Nick Ward

Well, this has been the strangest quarter on memory, I’m sure a lot of folks can relate. All PARADISEC staff and affiliates, across our three main institutional location (Universities of Sydney & Melbourne, and ANU in Canbera) have been working at home for the past 6+ weeks. This has slowed down some aspects of our … Read more

PARADISEC Activity Update – Feb 2020

14 February 2020 by Nick Ward

We had a busy 2019, and are continuing that trend into 2020. The archive now houses 541 collections, containing 27,126 items, and representing 1232 languages. We have 74.4 TB of data, of which 20.4 TB is our 11,977 hours of audio files.

Honiara language workshop, August 2019

25 October 201929 August 2019 by Nick Thieberger

The Solomon Islands Kulu Language Institute (KLI) organised a workshop in August this year that attracted 100 participants representing 44 languages of the Solomon Islands.

The venue was the leaf house at Saint Barnabas Anglican Cathedral Grounds, Honiara. The workshop was sponsored by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, the Kulu Language Institute, the University of Melbourne, The Research Unit for Indigenous Language, and Islands Bible Ministries.