Ethnographic and Linguistic Archives for the Digital Age

Among the paradoxes of the information age is that while it is ever easier for scholars at Yale and elsewhere to study ancient and rare manuscripts produced hundreds of years ago, collections that are merely decades old are increasingly inaccessible as the media formats in which they were recorded–be they VHS tape or a floppy disk–become obsolete.

The realization that significant records for research and scholarship, ranging from transcripts of oral traditions to film and photographs, are at risk of being denied to future generations, drives two international research initiatives that are helping to collect, protect and connect archives of ethnographic and linguistic material using digital tools. Digital Himalaya and the World Oral Literature Project are now co-located at Yale and the University of Cambridge, directed by Dr Mark Turin, Associate Research Scientist with the South Asian Studies Council.

Digital Himalaya was established a decade ago by Professor Alan Macfarlane, Mark Turin, Sarah Harrison and Sara Shneiderman, at Cambridge University. Its immediate objectives were to:

1. preserve in a digital medium anthropological materials from the Himalayan region that were fast degenerating in their current form, including film, photographs, audio recordings, field notes, maps and rare publications;

2. make these resources available over the web so that researchers and students might use them;

3. make these resources available on DVD to the descendants of the people from whom the materials were collected.

Along with over 300,000 pages of scanned and indexed print matter in PDF format, Digital Himalaya now hosts a searchable database of the Census of Nepal (2001); over 2,500 historical and contemporary maps of the region; hundreds of hours of film and video of Bhutan, Nepal, India and Tibet from the 1930s to the present; and a growing collection of contemporary audio recordings of Himalayan musical traditions. A unique archive of unpublished bird reports collected by Carol and Tim Inskipp, the foremost ornithologists working in Nepal, was recently made available to Digital Himalaya for online dissemination. This acquisition intersects with Yale’s long-standing engagement with environmental concerns and Yale faculty research interests in the natural resources of the Himalayan region. At Yale, Digital Himalaya staff will extend and deepen the scanning of heritage collections, and explore embedding the project in the structure of the university library by migrating all datasets to a digital repository for long-term sustainability.

Just as the Digital Himalaya project has helped to create and then curate a dynamic ethnographic archive, the World Oral Literature Project harnesses emerging information and communication technologies to build a community portal of recordings on endangered languages. Since its establishment in 2009, the Project has collaborated with local communities to support them in the documentation of their own oral narratives for posterity and for active revitalisation programs. To this end, the Project provides small grants to fund the collecting of oral literature, with a particular focus on the peoples of Asia and the Pacific. Project staff lead training workshops on field methods and storage techniques for grant recipients and scholars working in related fields. The World Oral Literature Project also publishes a monograph and occasional papers series, and makes digitized recordings accessible through its website for free. By stimulating the documentation of oral literature and by building a network for cooperation and collaboration, the Project supports a growing community of scholars and indigenous researchers around the world.

Over the last 500 years, three quarters of the oral cultures of the world have disappeared. By the end of this century, the remaining oral cultures may be lost. At the same time, much of the ethnographic data that has been collected over the last 100 years—films, audio recordings, photographs and field notes—remains uncatalogued and is deteriorating in storage. These traces of humanity’s diverse cultural expressions are in urgent need of cataloguing, preservation and dissemination. By working collaboratively with local communities and by leveraging resources at two of the world’s best universities, Digital Himalaya and the World Oral Literature Project are helping to collect and protect the voices of these vanishing worlds.