Communities of Interest: Issues in Establishing a Digital Resource on Murrinh-patha song at Wadeye (Port Keats), NT

Abstract

Linguistics and musicology, along with other fieldwork-based disciplines, have obligations to facilitate access to research results by the communities whose cultural heritage is recorded and analysed, especially when the languages and musics in question are otherwise little documented, have few speakers or performers, and are threatened by the global dominance of English. This paper presents early results of our planning for establishment of a digital resource to preserve and make accessible recordings and other documentation of Murrinh-patha public dance-songs at Wadeye, a remote Indigenous community in Australia's Northern Territory. With the recent establishment of the Wadeye Knowledge Centre, copies of recordings previously left in the community by researchers have been digitized and made available through computer workstations. Many of these digitized recordings, however, have poor or no documentation and thus are difficult to locate and access. The most urgent task is to work with elderly performers and composers to assemble metadata about the oldest recordings of songs and who composed and performed them. In order to maximise local accessibility and use, both elders and young people will be involved in planning and creation of a bilingual search interface to the collection. Planning must also consider sustainability issues through integration with other local initiatives, appropriate use of open standards and formats, locally sustainable technical platforms, and regular backup and maintenance. 384

Customary Assets and Contemporary Artistry: Multimodal Learning and Remote Economic Participation

“…Turpin and Green (2011) record and archive sand drawing and storytelling and record song and singing for dancers, including those of Arrernte, Kaytetye, Anmatyerr and Waramungu homelands. Turpin's work extends earlier archival recording of Aboriginal song in the Northern Territory, in the traditions of Koch (2013), Marett (2005), and Barwick, Marett, Blythe, and Walsh (2007), Barwick, Marett, Walsh, Reid, and Ford (2005). Green (2009), Biddle (2007) and Watson (2003) have concentrated effort in recording the way language, sand storytelling, performance and body painting are combined in landscapes of seen and unseen features, and Biddle (2007) and Watson (2003) extend this to the relationship of sand-drawing and body design with contemporary women's painting.…”

Developing collection management tools to create more robust and reliable linguistic data

“…Users make use of iTunes not because they want to manage metadata for their music files but because they want to listen to music. In fact, the user-friendly nature of the iTunes interface has even inspired the repurposing of iTunes as a collection management tool for linguistics and ethnomusicology (Barwick et al 2005). Another example of good data management software can be found in image organization tools such as Adobe Lightroom.…”

Including Music and the Temporal Arts in Language Documentation

“…Even when internet connections are intermittent or very slow, it may be possible to set up a web application to operate in offline mode. In 2009-2010, the Murriny Patha song project group in conjunction with Wadeye Aboriginal Languages Centre built on the recordings and information collected by the project to develop a web database illustrated by song texts with interlinear glossing and contextual information presented alongside streaming audio files (Barwick, et al 2010). In this implementation, in which there were up to 30 performance tokens of the same song text, it proved too timeconsuming to link the song texts to each individual sound file, but we have previously used ELAN to produce timecoding for presentation of glossed song texts in systems such as EOPAS, the Ethno-ER online presentation and annotation system (Schroeter & Thieberger 2006), Such initiatives are quite timeconsuming and depend on the availability of resources and much effort in collaboration from community members and researchers.…”