Scholars Digitise Endangered Languages

Some languages from the Pacific islands are part of a significant collection of endangered languages that have been added onto the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s Australian Memory of the World Project (UNESCO Australian MOW).

The collection PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources In Endangered Cultures), co-managed by the University of Melbourne, was created to digitise research and cultural records to make sure they don’t get lost, damaged or destroyed.

PARADISEC is now available on UNESCO’s Australian MOW—MOW being an international project that aspires to preserve documentary evidence of humanity to prevent collective memory loss, which may result if these documents or recordings are lost or stored in forms that are no longer supported by technology.
“The archive contains over 8900 entries based on research and projects on endangered languages and cultures around the world,” said Dr Nick Thieberger, a senior research fellow in the University’s School of Languages and Linguistics and a PARADISEC Project manager. “There are nearly 2000 languages spoken in Australia, the South Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia and most of these have never been recorded, much less studied. “A large number of these languages are in such decline that only a few hundred will be spoken in the next century,” Thieberger said.
But in a region well known for having a low level of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection when it comes to Traditional Knowledge and Expressions of Culture (TK & EC), the handling of what belongs to indigenous Pacific Islanders comes with some concern.
In the past, similar collections of traditional art forms have ended up being exploited, used for commercial purposes and distributed overseas while traditional custodians are not acknowledged, much less benefit from any monetary gain.
The blame is usually put on the lack of awareness in Pacific islands countries of the urgent need to put in place measures to protect IPR of TK and EC and ways that indigenous custodians can benefit from these resources.
In this light, works such as the PARADISEC collection may be seen to increase the vulnerability of indigenous Pacific Islanders by making what they own easily accessible to the world.
“It is an issue that we are well aware of, that there are people in this world who will act in disrespectful and illegal ways,” said Thieberger. “On the other hand, researchers each have their own relationships with the people they work with and make recordings in good faith, usually with some kind of formal consent discussion between them and the people recorded.
“In my experience, it is more common to find people I have worked with want their language and recordings to be available for other people to listen to and learn about the village or island that it comes from.
“Every item in the PARADISEC collection has access conditions that specify how it can be used. These are applied by the depositors and we trust that they have negotiated them with the people recorded. In the case of legacy collections—those made before it was required to have consent forms signed by the speakers—we weigh up the benefit of making the material available against the cost of hiding it. “There is also a problem with research institutions closing access to research materials that would benefit. Again we have to weigh up the benefit of closing a collection on the chance that it may possibly contain material that is sensitive, and which we are in no position to judge since it is in a language we do not understand, against the need for speakers to access it,” Thieberger added. PARADISEC contains languages from most Pacific countries, said Thieberger, but the bigger collections are from Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Solomon Islands.
As standard procedure, its IPR protection mechanism protects each item in the collection with its own access condition while the entire collection has a default Creative Commons Non-commercial share-alike’ license. “Any use of material from the collection for commercial purposes would have to be negotiated with the depositor and, if possible, with the speaker,” Thieberger said. “Any materials made available by PARADISEC are covered by an agreement that means we can identify anyone who subsequently misuses material. PARADISEC has barely enough resources to operate, let alone to be able to locate speakers represented in the collection. We feel it is a valuable resource for those speakers and for cultural agencies in their countries, like the Vanuatu Cultural Center or the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies to have access to,” he added.
While the copyright issue is pertinent, the benefits to native custodians of collections of their art forms have immeasurable value. For endangered languages such as those in the PARADISEC collection, it is usually an opportunity for custodians to remember aspects of their cultures facing imminent extinction.
“In my experience, speakers of indigenous languages typically want them to have some presence on the web, or more generally, that people elsewhere in the world should be able to learn about that particular language.
“Most EC has little monetary value to outsiders, but has enormous value to the speakers who value finding recordings of their relatives in a collection like ours.
“There are a number of examples of records from our collection being taken back to source communities by researchers, thus generating a great deal of interest in the present-day descendants of the original speakers.
“We also have messages from people who have found their own relatives and being able to access the recordings online and greatly appreciate it,” said Thieberger.
The PARADISEC collection is made up of recordings of some music, songs as well as spoken narratives from everyday conversations.
The earliest works in the collection are found in Arthur Capell’s papers, dated the late 1800s, while audio recordings began and are dated in the 1950s.
PARADISEC describes Capell as an Australian linguist and ethnographer who spent much time recording and documenting both Australian Aboriginal languages and endangered languages in the Asia-Pacific region. “We have worked with cultural agencies in the Pacific and would like to do more of that, and to digitise analog recordings that may otherwise become unplayable. We currently have a funding application to work with the Solomon Islands Museum and Archives to digitise over 700 tapes in their collections. But we also have a backlog of tapes that need work and we need to find funds to pay for getting this work done,” Thieberger said.
PARADISEC is also an avenue where ethnographic researchers can send text, audio and visual materials to be preserved and remain discoverable, particularly to interested communities.