When Your Data is My Grandparents Singing. Digitisation and Access for Cultural Records, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2022-009Keywords:
linguistics archiving, musicological archiving, language documentation, language data managementAbstract
In this paper we discuss the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a research repository that explicitly aims to act as a conduit for research outputs to a range of audiences, both within and outside of academia. PARADISEC has been operating for 19 years, and has grown to hold over 390,000 files currently totaling 150 terabytes and representing 1,312 languages, many of them from Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. Our focus is on recordings and transcripts in the many small languages of the world, the songs and stories that are unique cultural expressions. While this research data is created for a particular project, it has huge value beyond academic research as it is typically oral tradition recorded in places where little else has been recorded. There is an increasing focus in academia on reproducible research and research data management, and repositories are the key to successful data management. We discuss the importance for research practice of having discipline-specific repositories. The data in our work is also cultural material that has value to the people recorded and their descendants, it is their grandparents and so we, as outsider researchers, have special responsibilities to treat the materials with respect and to ensure they are accessible to the people we have worked with.
Published
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2022 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):
-
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
-
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.
Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).