https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13307 2026-06-04T18:13:39Z 2026-06-04T18:13:39Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/30185 2023-03-09T05:10:34Z 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

Songs and the Deep Present Barwick, Linda This chapter contributes to frameworks for understanding the deep human past by considering how expansion of attention to the present, through performance among other practices, can change one’s awareness of self in relation to the world in all its aspects. In particular, through close attention to repetition phenomena in one Warlpiri women’s ceremonial song, I explore how nonlinear temporal structures in music may contribute to time “collapse”—that is, how “Indigenous embodied practices for knowing, remembering and re-enacting the past in the present blur the distinctions between time, making all history ‘now.’” Even though past performances may have left few or no traces in the material record, I suggest that musical performance and cognition have operated and continue to operate as integral and deeply embedded components within an interplay of multiple interacting and socially negotiated responses to the world.

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z Ford, Payi Linda Barwick, Linda Marett, Allan https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20394.2 2026-05-04T06:55:00Z 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z

Mirrwana and wurrkama: applying an Indigenous knowledge framework to collaborative research on ceremonies Ford, Payi Linda; Barwick, Linda; Marett, Allan This chapter outlines how Ford, Barwick and Marett have collaborated to develop, implement, and critically evaluate a research project that integrates and remains true to both Indigenous and western academic knowledge systems. The context is the ceremonies of the Tyikim people from remote, rural and urban areas in the Wagait-Daly region of the Top End of Northern Territory, and in particular, the series of ceremonies that followed the death of Ford’s mother in 2007. We outline the processes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration that underpinned the performance and documentation of the ceremonies and, more specifically, how this process can be seen through the Indigenous knowledge framework mirrwana-wurrkama, developed by Ford based on her family’s traditional cycad nut processing practices.

2014-01-01T00:00:00Z Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella Barwick, Linda Green, Jennifer https://hdl.handle.net/2123/27700 2022-06-23T23:21:44Z 2021-01-01T00:00:00Z

Sharing and storing digital cultural records in Central Australian Indigenous communities Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella; Barwick, Linda; Green, Jennifer This article considers how Indigenous peoples in Central Australia share and keep digital records of events and cultural knowledge in a period of rapid technological change. To date, research has focused upon the development of digital archives and platforms that reflect Indigenous epistemologies and incorporation of protocols governing access to information. Yet there is scant research on how individuals with little access to such media share and hold—or not, as the case may be—digital cultural information. After surveying current enabling infrastructures in Central Australia, we examine how materials are held and shared when people do not have easy access to databases and the Internet. We analyze examples of practices of sharing materials to draw out issues that arise in managing storage and circulation of cultural records via Universal Serial Bus (USB) flash drives, mobile phones, and other devices. We consider how the affordances of various platforms support, extend, and/or challenge Indigenous socialities and ontologies.

2021-01-01T00:00:00Z Harris, Amanda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24592 2021-03-16T00:17:53Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Disciplining music: Too many Peter Sculthorpes? Harris, Amanda Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970 offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicizes the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralizing auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture. This book seeks to listen to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualizing recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and postcolonizing efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures. Contents: 1. Staging Assimilation: Too Many John Antills? Prelude, Mungari Buldyan – Song for my Grandfather by Shannon Foster 2. 1930s – Performing Cultures: Navigating Protection, Responding to Assimilation 3. 1940s – Reclaiming an Indigenous Identity 4. 1950s – Jubilee Celebrations, Protest and National Cultural Institutions Interlude by Tiriki Onus 5. 1960-67 – Aboriginal Performance Takes the Main Stage 6. 1967-1970 – The End of Assimilation? 7. Disciplining Music: Too Many Peter Sculthorpes? Coda by Nardi Simpson https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/representing-australian-aboriginal-music-and-dance-1930-1970-9781501362934/

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Harris, Amanda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24591 2026-05-07T01:54:05Z 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

Pan-Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean Harris, Amanda From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.

2017-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24242 2020-12-26T02:15:28Z 1994-01-01T00:00:00Z

Variation or contamination? Narrative instability in the Italian traditional song Donna lombarda Barwick, Linda This paper arises out of my doctoral research (Barwick 1985), which examined a large sample of documented versions of the Italian traditional narrative song (or 'ballad', to adopt the term by which such strophic narrative songs are generally known elsewhere in Europe), Donna lombarda (Nigra 1). In this sample of 479 , 120 of which were accompanied by musical information, no two versions were exactly alike . It became increasingly clear to me in the course of my research that neither melodic, musical, formulaic nor narrative analysis would yield a stable definition of the song; indeed, such detailed analysis forced me to confront the impossibility of reducing the song to a neat abstraction of any kind . Instead of talking of the 'song' Donna lombarda, I suggested we should rather discuss it as a 'song tradition'. The overall picture of narrative change given by the examination of narrative variation in the Italian versions of Donna lombarda supports a view of the song tradition as an inherently unstable process that can no more be defined in terms of a particular plot than in terms of a particular textual or melodic realisation; rather it is a temporal process, whose realisation is contingent upon the conditions of its performance. What are some of the implications of this perspective for consideration of the interaction of one song tradition with another, in other words, for the consideration of what has been in the past conceived as 'contamination' of two (presumably pure) essential songs? I will approach this point via a brief demonstration of the inherent instability of the narrative of the Donna lombarda song tradition as revealed in the documents analysed.

1994-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24241 2020-12-26T01:58:37Z 1992-01-01T00:00:00Z

Women as performers and agents of change in the Italian ballad tradition Barwick, Linda What is lost when performances of orally-transmitted traditional songs are transcribed and published as written documents? This question arose for me as a result of the lack of connection I found between my experiences as a performer of Italian traditional songs and the ways in which the subject was treated by academic folklorists, among others, whose analyses tended to be centred in the content of the written documents. In particular, the concern of the written academic tradition with the "problem" of variation seemed to presuppose that staticity was normal, and yet my experience as a performer was that the unfolding of each performance in a unique context led inevitably to differences in the details. And all those differences were explainable in experiential terms; for example, I might sing in a different key depending on the current state of my voice, or I might leave out part of a song because I felt uncomfortable with the performance situation, or because I was singing with other people who knew a different version of the song. I came to believe that the reason academics expected uniformity between performances was related to the normality of exact reproduction inthe print media, and that in order to understand variation in the documents of an orally transmitted performance tradition it was necessary to ground the analysis in an awareness of the actual conditions of performance of the songs: even though the particular experiences that would explain the form of each document are no longer accessible, an awareness of the types of experience affecting performance seemed to me to lead to very different ways of interpreting and approaching the documents as a body of data. In particular, the written documents could no longer be seen as self-sufficient items of information, but rather represented a series of incomplete records of random moments in the continuing process of performance within an otherwise unwritten oral tradition .

1992-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/24151 2026-05-07T01:54:05Z 2153-09-01T00:00:00Z

Transcription as deflowering: collection practices in Italy, pre-1939 Barwick, Linda This paper focuses on the interaction between transcribers and performers of traditional songs before the ready availability of sound recording. What acts did the collectors perform to produce the written documents that are our only record of performance traditions of that time? How did they represent this activity to themselves and others? Although the purposes for which these documents were made may be no longer relevant, exploring how they were shaped by the historical context of their collection may enable contemporary researchers to revalidate an often rejected resource, as well as reminding us that our own work is shaped by similar forces.

2153-09-01T00:00:00Z Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20841 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Reconfiguring relational personhood among Lander Warlpiri Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella In recent years many Indigenous communities in central Australia have undergone multiple dramatic changes. Responses to the resulting tensions, conflicts and anxiety illuminate local understandings of personhood. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork with Lander Warlpiri/Anmatyerr Willowra (Northern Territory), this paper discusses how relatedness (involving social obligations and reciprocity) among particular categories of persons was understood and maintained during the 1970s, comparing this with the contemporary period, in which considerable conflict between previously united families has occurred. It considers the implications of these differences for notions of personhood, taking into account the altered material conditions in which people live today, changes in practices such as marriage arrangements and ritual, shifting notions of “property”, and embodied relations to land. Local cultural understandings of relational being are explored through analysis of a myth that was publicly performed by a senior male and recorded by young media trainees, with the intent that the younger generation reflect upon what it is to be a person in Warlpiri/Anmatyerr society today.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20844 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Continuity and Change in Warlpiri Practices of Marking the Landscape Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella Warlpiri people of Central Australia have served on a number of occasions as exemplars of the Derridean premise that no society is without writing (Derrida 1976: 109) (e.g. Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983: 139; Biddle 2002). The debate about the reasoning behind this proposition is outside the scope of my interests here. Nonetheless, it is certainly helpful to have a term, such as “writing”, that groups together the various kinds of practices that Warlpiri engage in to give visual form to their understanding of the world. Earlier work has focused on such aspects of Warlpiri visual communicative practices as sand drawings, body and ground designs, and sacred objects (e.g. Munn 1974); contemporary acrylic paintings (e.g. Dussart 1999); and gesture language (e.g. Kendon 1988). Building on the voluminous literature on marking of the Australian landscape by ancestral Dreaming beings (e.g. Meggitt 1986; Myers 1986; Munn 1974; Langton 2000), more recent work among Warlpiri and their neighbours has explored the issue of inscription of the landscape in relation to the domain of women’s ritual and artistic practice (Biddle 2002; Watson 2003). The purpose of the present contribution is to extend the discussion of the marking of landscape. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this chapter explores how, when and why Warlpiri Aboriginal people in Central Australia mark the landscapes within which they live. Attending to continuities in people’s socio-cultural practices through time, I also consider the relationship between ancestral and contemporary practices of marking landscape, through which people imbue place with meaning and manage space.

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20842 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

Alien relations: Ecological and Ontological Dilemmas Posed for Indigenous Australians in the Management of “Feral” Camels on their Lands Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella The colonization of indigenous people and their lands typically involved the introduction of domesticated species integral to the development of settler economies. These animals were bound up with European social and ontological understandings that were profoundly different to those of the peoples being colonized—in particular, notions of the human–animal divide. In central Australia, Indigenous people have responded to introduced animals variously with fear, resistance, openness, creativity and resilience. In doing so, they have had to negotiate incommensurable differences and disjunctions, involving the nature of the animals themselves and the “pastoral” relations Europeans have with these animals compared to Indigenous people’s totemically based relations with native animals.1 Now, irrevocably entangled, they have to re-negotiate their relations with domesticated animals such as camels, which have become free-ranging and are increasing in number on their land. The management of these animals creates tensions and dilemmas for people who want to maintain proper relationships with their country and the other-than- human constituents who inhabit it. This chapter addresses the situation in regard to camels in central Australia, focusing on Aboriginal people who adopted camels for use as transport. It considers the conflicts and challenges people face in reconciling their responsibilities toward beings to whom they are ancestrally related with their responsibilities toward camels, with whom they have a shared history and whose cosmological significance has shifted with the adoption of Christianity. I argue that the choices people make have implications not only for other entities in their environment, but also for the people themselves and for their relational ontologies.

2017-01-01T00:00:00Z Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella Wafer, Jim https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20843 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

“Bilingual time” at Willowra: The beginnings of a community-initiated program, 1976-1977 Vaarzon-Morel, Petronella; Wafer, Jim Formal schooling began at the Warlpiri-speaking community of Willowra, in north-western Central Australia, in 1968. When the present authors arrived at the school in 1976, to take up positions as the new teachers, many adults spoke An- matyerr in addition to Warlpiri, and also “station English”, which they had learnt while working in the pastoral industry. Few younger children spoke English, but were expected to learn to read and write it at the school, which was still something of a foreign country for them and their families. The educational material provided was largely irrelevant to them, and little printed matter existed outside of the school, with only a few Warlpiri adults able to read it. People’s understandings of the meaning of school derived from visible, pedagogic practices characteristic of mainstream schools; for example, children were required to wear uniforms, sit at desks and learn to write using pencils. Yet, despite the alien nature of school, the community came to embrace it, transforming its relevance and role in their lives through the introduction of a Warlpiri-English bilingual program. In this chapter we review “bilingual time” (as it is remembered at Willowra) in the years we spent there in 1976-1977, when the bilingual program was introduced. We set our narrative in the context of policy conflicts that eventually led to the dismantling of the program in the early 2000s, and consider the advantages of the short-lived pol- icy environment in which we operated, which was school-based and community- oriented.

2017-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Turpin, Myfany https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20670 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2013-09-12T00:00:00Z

Central Australian Women’s Traditional Music: Yawulyu/Awelye. Indigenous Music Case Study Report for the Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures Project. Revised Version. Barwick, Linda; Turpin, Myfany This report concerns yawulyu/awelye, an important ceremonial genre of traditional songs performed by women in Central Australia. Drawing on extensive published literature, our fieldwork in the area over many years, and a series of interviews we conducted as part of the Sustainable Futures Project, we discuss various issues and ideas concerning the sustainability of the tradition. "Sustainable futures for music cultures: Towards an ecology of musical diversity" seeks to identify key factors in musical sustainability and to make this knowledge available to counteract the risk of decline and loss of music cultures. Centring on nine in-depth studies from both vibrant and endangered music cultures across the globe, Sustainable futures aims to deliver a model to empower communities to build musical futures on their own terms. A chapter drawing on this report was published as: Barwick, Linda, and Myfany Turpin. “Central Australian Women’s Traditional Songs: Keeping Yawulyu/Awelye Strong.” In Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures, edited by Huib Schippers and Catherine Grant, 111–44. Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190259075.003.0005. Supported by the Australian Research Council, the project was realised over five years by Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre at Griffith University, Southern Cross University, and the Universities of Sydney, Otago, Washington, Lund and London (SOAS), in partnership with the Music Council of Australia, the World Music and Dance Centre, and the International Music Council (founded by UNESCO).

2013-09-12T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20431 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 1995-01-01T00:00:00Z

Unison and "disagreement" in a mixed women's and men's performance from the Ellis collection, Oodnadatta, 1966 Barwick, Linda This chapter explores the nature of musical 'disagreements' in a performance of the Kungka Kutjara (Two Women) performed by Antikirinya women and men at Oodnadatta in 1966, recorded by Catherine Ellis. Although unisonic performance is preferred in most Central Australian singing, varying degrees of divergence can be heard, generally resulting from a lack of synchronicity in presenting the melodic contour. In the performance in question, it appears that the women and men singers apply different principles in setting the rhythmic text to the melody.

1995-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Laughren, Mary Turpin, Myfany https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20398 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Sustaining women's yawulyu/awelye: some practitioners' and learners' perspectives Barwick, Linda; Laughren, Mary; Turpin, Myfany In 2010 the authors visited various Central Australian communities including Willowra, Tennant Creek, Alekarenge, Barrow Creek and Ti Tree, to interview some of our research collaborators past and present about how they saw the present and future of their yawulyu/awelye traditions. Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and Awelye (in Kaytetye and other Arandic languages) are cognate names for women’s country-based rituals, including songs, dancing, ritual objects and knowledge surrounding particular country and Dreaming stories. In the course of our research we spoke to women from different communities, different age groups, different language groups, and different clans, seeking to open discussion about past and contemporary practices of learning, performing and teaching this performance-based knowledge, to help us to understand what the practitioners saw as the most fruitful ways of sustaining the traditions, as well as what difficulties they saw in their way. In this article we present statements from many of the women interviewed, highlighting the key issues that emerged and discussing the role of recordings and other documentation of performances for the future sustainability of the various yawulyu/awelye traditions discussed.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Turpin, Myfany https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20390 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Central Australian women’s traditional songs: keeping yawulyu/awelye strong Barwick, Linda; Turpin, Myfany Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and awelye (in Arandic XE “Arandic” languages) are cognate names for Australian Aboriginal women’s country-based ceremonies in central Australia. Ceremonial performances constitute a collective expression of knowledge surrounding the particular country, lifestyles, and Dreaming stories to which the ceremonies relate. This knowledge is presented in different modalities including song text, rhythm, melody, movement (gesture, dance), ritual designs, ritual objects, and spatial organization and orientation. This chapter discusses various issues and ideas concerning the sustainability of the tradition. It draws on extensive published literature, the authors’ fieldwork in the area over many years, and a series of interviews conducted as part of the Sustainable Futures project.

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Thieberger, Nick https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20395 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Unlocking the archives Barwick, Linda; Thieberger, Nick The popular expression ‘locked in the archive’ suggests that items are impossible to find and access once they are archived. Benefiting from new technologies, digital language and music archives nowadays provide an increasing number of records online in and about the world’s small languages. Just six of these archives list between them over 31,000 items, representing something like 2,300 languages. We can certainly do better at making records more widely available—especially records from small, marginalised and sometimes isolated communities—but how do we build pathways for re-use? We discuss the practice of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) through the rubric provided by the FAIR principles. Building resources for learning and teaching language, history and culture, revitalising local performance traditions or reinforcing social identity through broadcasting are all possible pathways for future re-use of archival material. Ultimately, it is up to community members to decide on what they will do with archival materials once they have access; and it is up to language archives to listen and do our best to keep the pathways open to enable that.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Toltz, Joseph https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20393 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

Quantifying the Ineffable? The University of Sydney's 2014 Guidelines for Non-Traditional Research Outputs Barwick, Linda; Toltz, Joseph Ever since the Australian Research Council (ARC) recognised “non-traditional research outputs” (NTROs) as valid expressions of research, developing benchmarks to measure the quality of artistic research has been of increasing interest to the Australian higher education sector. Because research quality (as measured through the triennial Excellence in Research Australia exercise) is a driver for block funding to higher education institutions, decisions about the quality of “artistic research” need to be transparent, based on peer review and justifiable to government auditors. With these requirements in mind, in 2014 the University of Sydney adopted University Guidelines for Non- Traditional Research Outputs. Following the framework and terminology developed by the ARC, the Guidelines recognise that: [r]esearch output may consist of any form of publicly available, assessable materials embodying research, whether produced by writing, making, composing, designing, performing, or curating. (The University of Sydney, 2014) Artistic research (“creative work as research”) is placed within a conceptual framework embracing not only standard print research outputs and but also other “non-traditional” outputs of traditional research (scholarly translations, critical editions, technical standards, exhibitions of archaeological or scientific objects, and research reports for external bodies). Complementing the general criteria and principles, the University Guidelines also include specific criteria and output weightings for each type of NTRO. Recognising the inherently unsatisfactory nature of any system of quality metrics, the presentation will discuss issues arising from the development and implementation of the guidelines within the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

2017-01-01T00:00:00Z Curran, Georgia Fisher, Simon Japangardi Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20389 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Engaging with archived Warlpiri song Curran, Georgia; Fisher, Simon Japangardi; Barwick, Linda In the Central Australian Warlpiri community of Yuendumu, efforts to document and revitalise Warlpiri songs take place in an era where there are fewer contexts for the performance of associated ceremonies, consequently increasing the endangerment of this unique intellectual tradition. This paper outlines recent initiatives providing contexts for Warlpiri people to engage with archived recordings through repatriation based on-country at the Warlpiri Media Archive. We examine the community’s perspectives and responses to legacy recordings made in the 1950s and 1960s, which captured a particular way of singing that has undergone significant change over the last few decades, even though some of the people who were recorded are still alive today. The individuals who have so far engaged with these archived recordings have drawn out unique perspectives on their contents, including insights into language change, shifting musical structures and the markedly different performance contexts in which these songs were once performed. These examples illustrate that repatriation efforts are much more than a simple process of ‘return’ of cultural materials to their communities of origin—re-engagement with legacy recordings influences performance traditions in their contemporary contexts.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Bailes, Freya Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20391 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Absolute tempo in multiple performances of Aboriginal songs: analyzing recordings of djanba 12 and djanba 14 Bailes, Freya; Barwick, Linda Songs that are not notated but transmitted through live performance are of particular interest for the psychological study of the stability of tempo across multiple performances. While experimental research points to highly accurate memory for the tempi of well- known recorded music, this study asks whether there is any evidence of absolute tempo in a performance tradition that does not draw on such reference recordings. Fifty-four field recordings of performances of one Aboriginal dance-song, Djanba 14, were analyzed. Results showed that over a span of 34 years, performance tempi deviated positively or negatively, on average, by 2%. Such small tempo variation is similar to JND thresholds to discriminate the tempi of isochronous sequences. Thirty- five field recordings of another song from the same repertory, Djanba 12, deviated in tempi by an average of 3%. We discuss the musical, psychological, physical, and cultural factors likely to shape such temporal stability.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20392 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z

Keepsakes and surrogates: hijacking music technology at Wadeye (northwest Australia) Barwick, Linda This paper focuses on some uses of recording technology in the township of Wadeye in Australia’s Northern Territory, resulting from a project focusing on djanba, a genre of public ceremonial song created and performed by Murriny Patha people. Murriny Patha is one of the healthiest Australian languages, with about 2500 speakers, most living in Wadeye and nearby. In recent years, with substantial social change in the community and the deaths of key composers and performers of the traditional ceremonial genres djanba, wangga and lirrga, performances of ceremonial song have markedly declined. In collaboration with the Wadeye Aboriginal Languages Centre (WALC), the Kanamkek Yile Ngala Museum and the Wadeye Library and Knowledge Centre (WLKC), our research team (Allan Marett, Michael Walsh, Joe Blythe, Nick Reid and Lysbeth Ford) recently completed a project to digitise and document all the song recordings held by WALC, and to make them available through an iTunes database in the WLKC. Port Keats (the early name for Wadeye) was originally established in 1932 as a Catholic mission, and the Catholic church and the Catholic school are the two most visible institutions in the community. In the past, live performances of traditional ceremonial music were used as part of church liturgy, but in recent years recorded music has taken over this function, and indeed one of the main uses for the iTunes database has been to provide music for playing at funerals in the church. Family members of the deceased often ask for CD copies of this music as a keepsake. This paper addresses the modalities of production of these recordings, and how the adoption of these new technologies supports various aspects of traditional social organisation while creating new channels for social interaction and displacing old ones. I am particularly interested in the extent to which localised diversity of place and family affiliation is played out in the composition, performance, content and circulation of the songs.

2017-01-01T00:00:00Z O'Keeffe, Isabel Barwick, Linda Coleman, Carolyn Manmurulu, David Manmurulu, Jenny Mardbinda, Janet Naragoidj, Paul Singer, Ruth https://hdl.handle.net/2123/20396 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Multiple uses for old and new recordings: perspectives from the multilingual community of Warruwi O'Keeffe, Isabel; Barwick, Linda; Coleman, Carolyn; Manmurulu, David; Manmurulu, Jenny; Mardbinda, Janet; Naragoidj, Paul; Singer, Ruth This paper reports on collaborative research by a team of linguists, musicologists, elders, educators and young people from the multilingual Indigenous community of Warruwi (South Goulburn Island, Northern Territory, Australia). A key aim of the various projects has been to make recordings available to the community and to equip and empower community members to be involved in the documentation and to control how old and new recordings are used. In this paper, we report on the repatriation of archival recordings of language and song at Warruwi and discuss how the Warruwi community uses these recordings—and more recent recordings by the research team—for maintenance or revitalisation purposes. Different perspectives will be provided by various members of the community. We demonstrate the need for researchers to have ongoing discussions with community members to inform collaborative research and to ensure communities are empowered to have control over recorded materials and determine priorities for ongoing documentation and revitalisation projects.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13112 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2006-01-01T00:00:00Z

Marri Ngarr lirrga songs: a musicological analysis of song pairs in performance Barwick, Linda This article discusses a set of lirrga songs performed for Allan Marett on 1 October 1998 at Wadeye in Australia's Northern Territory by a group of senior Marri Ngarr men comprising the singers and composers Pius Luckan and Clement Tchinburur, the ritual specialist John Nummar (who acted as backup singer), and the karnbi (didjeridu) player Benedict Tchinburur (younger brother of Pius Luckan and Clement Tchinburur). The texts of these songs and information about Marri Ngarr language are presented in the companion article by Ford in this volume. The song session was performed for Marett to teach him about Marri Ngarr songs, and to document lirrga songs for future generations. The article shows how the ordering of songs in the session demonstrates the Marri Ngarr system of rhythmic modes. This is a postprint version (author’s accepted manuscript) with page numbers adjusted to match the published version.

2006-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Marett, Allan Walsh, Michael Reid, Nicholas Ford, Lysbeth https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13113 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2005-01-01T00:00:00Z

Communities of interest: issues in establishing a digital resource on Murrinh-patha song at Wadeye (Port Keats), NT Barwick, Linda; Marett, Allan; Walsh, Michael; Reid, Nicholas; Ford, Lysbeth 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. This is a postprint version, with page numbers adjusted to match the published version.

2005-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13114 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2004-01-01T00:00:00Z

Turning it all upside down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive Barwick, Linda What could and should be the relationship between research archives of endangered cultural heritage materials and the originating community? This paper argues that recent developments in distributed computing in a networked environment have allowed us to re-imagine this relationship in a way that profoundly changes the role of the archive and reinforces the desirability of establishing ongoing reciprocal relationships with cultural heritage communities. Some possibilities are suggested drawing from experience with PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, established in 2003 as a collaborative venture between the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University) and with local community-based digital archives in the remote Australian communities of Belyuen and Wadeye. Repatriation and rights, planning principles for establishment and sustainability of local digital archives in community cultural centres, and models for a staged approach in setting up ongoing relationships with rights holders are discussed. The paper argues that digital archives, as distributed virtual institutions, need to engage with a number of different communities of interest: not only the individuals, communities, and institutions that own the cultural heritage objects we preserve, but also the wider academic community and international standards-setting bodies. Planning for our archives’ digital future means imagining ourselves as actors and creators within that virtual society. This is a postprint version, with page numbers adjusted to match the published version.

2004-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Birch, Bruce Evans, Nicholas https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13110 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

Iwaidja Jurtbirrk songs: bringing language and music together Barwick, Linda; Birch, Bruce; Evans, Nicholas Song brings language and music together. Great singers are at once musi- cians and wordsmiths, who toss rhythm, melody and word against one another in complex cross-play. In this paper we outline some initial findings that are emerg- ing from our interdisciplinary study of the musical traditions of the Cobourg region of western Arnhem Land, a coastal area situated in the far north of the Australian continent 350 kilometres northeast of Darwin. We focus on a set of songs called Jurtbirrk, sung in Iwaidja, a highly endangered language, whose core speaker base is now located in the community of Minjilang on Croker Island. We bring to bear analytical methodologies from both musicology and linguistics to illuminate this hitherto undocumented genre of love songs. This is a postprint version (author’s accepted manuscript), with page numbers in the article adjusted to match the published version (references and notes appear in the opposite order).

2007-01-01T00:00:00Z Marett, Allan Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13111 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2007-01-01T00:00:00Z

Musical and linguistic perspectives on Aboriginal song Marett, Allan; Barwick, Linda This article serves as an introduction to the special issue 'Studies in Aboriginal Song' edited by Marett and Barwick. Since 1984, numerous collections of essays dedicated entirely or partly to Aboriginal song and dance appeared. Each of these represented a response to particular stimuli. Much of the work presented in the present volume, Studies in Aboriginal Song: A Special Issue of Australian Aboriginal Studies, resulted from research projects that focus on endangered language and music and involved either collaborative work between linguists and musicologist, or work by scholars with training in both disciplines. Faced as we are with the ongoing and escalating loss of so many of Australia’s Indigenous languages and performance traditions, there is some evidence that studies of Aboriginal song are increasing. And yet too little is being done too late by too few. In musicology in particular, the discipline has failed adequately to respond to the cultural tragedy that is unfolding before our eyes as manifold traditions of Australia’s Indigenous heritage are lost to future generations of Aboriginal peoples and to the national heritage. Major initiatives, such as the various endangered language programs mentioned in our essay, and the National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia, are attempting to find solutions that will empower Indigenous peoples in their struggle to maintain their threatened languages and traditions in the face of the enormous forces arrayed against them. But so much remains to be done, not least in training young persons, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, with the disciplinary and practical skills to meet this challenge. This is a post-print version (authors' accepted manuscript) with page numbers edited to match the published version.

2007-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13102 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2011-01-01T00:00:00Z

Musical form and style in Murriny Patha djanba songs at Wadeye (Northwest Australia) Barwick, Linda This chapter concerns the musical form and social history of djanba songs—public dance-songs in Murriny Patha language from Wadeye, in Australia's northwest Northern Territory—and how they fit within the musical landscape of traditional Australian Indigenous song styles. One djanba song composed by Lawrence Kolumboort is compared with exemplars of other relevant public dance-song genres, namely junba (from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, composed by Ngarinyin-Miwa composer Scotty Nyalgodi Martin) and lirrga (a didjeridu-accompanied dance-song in Marri Ngarr language, composed by Pius Luckan and often performed alongside djanba in the community of Wadeye). Analysis shows how encounters and exchanges with other musical styles have been of profound importance in the genesis and development of djanba song style. This is a postprint of the author's accepted manuscript with page numbers edited to match the published version.

2011-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13089 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2003-01-01T00:00:00Z

Tempo bands, metre and rhythmic mode in Marri Ngarr 'Church Lirrga' songs Barwick, Linda During the 1970s, the Marri Ngarr composer Pius Luckan and his brother Clement Tchinburur created a set of liturgical songs ('churcb lirrga') based on the didjeridu-accompanied dance-song genre Lirrga, one of several public ceremonial genres in Wadeye, NT. Musical analysis and discussion witb composers sbows that the songs fall into named distinct tempo ranges ('tempo bands’), that tempo bands correlate witb different metres in the vocal part (tbis combination is termed 'rhythmic mode'), and that singers highlight rhythmic mode by systematic juxtaposition of contrasting songs. Accounts of similar compositional practices in other Australian song repertoires are noted. This is a postprint version (author's accepted manuscript) with page numbering adjusted to match the published version. Due to format obsolescence of the original graphics files, some of the figures are poor quality screenshots.

2003-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13092 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Including music and the temporal arts in language documentation Barwick, Linda This chapter is intended for linguistic researchers preparing to undertake fieldwork, probably documenting one of the world’s many small or endangered languages. Recognising that linguists have their own priorities and methodologies in language documentation and description, I will advance reasons for including in your corpus the song and/or instrumental music that you are almost certain to encounter in the course of your fieldwork. I start by providing an overview of current thinking about the nature and significance of human musical capacities and the commonly encountered types, context and significance of music, especially in relation to language. Since research funding usually precludes having a musicologist tag along in the original fieldwork, I will suggest some topics for discussion that would be of interest to musicologists, and make some suggestions for what is needed on a practical level to make your recordings useful to musicologists at a later date. I comment on the technical and practical requirements for a good musical documentation and how these might differ from language documentation, and also provide some suggestions on a workflow for field production of musical recordings for community use. Examples taken from my own fieldwork are intended to provide food for thought, and not to imply that music and dance traditions in other societies are necessarily structured in comparable ways. This is a postprint with page numbers edited to match the printed version. The section numbering is different from the printed version.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13091 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2005-01-01T00:00:00Z

Performance, aesthetics, experience: thoughts on Yawulyu mungamunga songs Barwick, Linda In 2000 a CD of Warumungu women’s Yawulyu Mungamunga songs was published by Festival records (Papulu Apparr-kari Aboriginal Language and Culture Centre & Barwick, 2000, 479), and launched in Tennant Creek and in Sydney at the National Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia. In Sydney a large audience of musicologists and academics witnessed the launch of these songs into the national and international arena, an event marked by speeches and ceremonial exchanges of gifts as well as a performance of the songs with dancing by a group of women who had travelled to Sydney for the occasion. The Sydney CD launch was just one in a long line of performances that Warumungu people have presented for outsiders. In a canvas painted by E.G. Nakkamarra to celebrate the launch of the CD, cultural precedent was invoked to situate the publication of the CD as ngijinkirri, a Warumungu tradition of ceremonial sharing of food and performances with outsiders. For centuries, Warumungu people have performed their ceremonies in exchange with neighbouring Aboriginal groups, and ever since the Overland Telegraph Line was established north of present-day Tennant Creek in the 1870s, performances have also been mounted for papulanji (the Warumungu language word for non-Aboriginal people). These instances demonstrate that Warumungu people expect their performances to have social and aesthetic power for outsiders as well as for cultural insiders. This article reflects my own aesthetic engagement with these Yawulyu Mungamunga songs, which I first recorded near Tennant Creek in 1996. This is a postprint version edited to match the page numbers of the published version. Some errors in figure numbering in the published version have been corrected here.

2005-01-01T00:00:00Z Comin, Antonio Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13077 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Re-presenting Italy in Australia through Theatre and Music, 1972-2002 Comin, Antonio; Barwick, Linda This chapter is based on a conversation with Antonio Comin at his home in Norwood, South Australia, on 2 March 2009, edited and annotated by Linda Barwick. Antonio Comin (born Cornuda, Italy, in 1933) migrated with his family to Australia in 1936. A graduate of the University of Sydney and the Università degli Studi di Firenze, he taught at the universities of Sydney, Melbourne and British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) before joining Flinders University in 1970 as foundation Professor of Italian. Until his retirement in 1996, his main teaching and research areas were Italian language, dialectology and traditional culture. Comin’s mission to establish and promote in South Australia the understanding of Italian language and culture was undertaken in large part through various theatrical productions he devised and mounted from 1976–2007, which increasingly incorporated his own writing as well as musical components including Italian traditional song. The Italian Folk Ensemble, a musical group formed as a result of Comin’s activities, has been active in community music performances as well as theatre productions since 1978, and after a hiatus of some years various members including Comin reformed in 2003 under the name “Gruppo La Questua”. Linda Barwick studied under Comin in the Italian Discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, and participated in the Italian Folk Ensemble and some of the theatrical productions mentioned here. After covering background about Comin’s early life and cultural formation in Australia and Italy, the chapter presents Comin’s commentary on the various theatrical productions he conceived and directed. Unless otherwise indicated, the speaker is Comin. Commentary in footnotes is by Barwick, who also compiled the figures and appendices.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13079 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

'Oltre l'Australia c'è la luna': Maggio garfagnino and the Emigrant Experience Barwick, Linda When I first visited the Garfagnana region of north-western Tuscany in 1991, I was assured by functionaries from the provincial government that the Maggio tradition of sung popular theatre would be finished within five years. The singers were too old, the tourists weren’t interested, there were no young people to carry it on. Yet over the next five years of my increasing involvement in the tradition, I saw a growth in the numbers of performances, active performers and companies, and audience numbers. This chapter advances some thoughts as to why Maggio continued so strongly against the odds in its home region of the Garfagnana, while attempts to mount performances in Australia have (to my knowledge) so far failed, despite the considerable numbers of Garfagnini who emigrated there. I will argue that the strength of the nexus between paese (home town) and performance practice in the Garfagnino Maggio stems from the Garfagnana’s long history of emigration, and that indeed various features of the Maggio genre appear to result from, or at least be intensified by, a “diaspora effect”, that is, the effect of expatriates on their community of origin. I argue that to understand the themes, form, performance practice and survival of this most localised of traditions we need to take into account the transnationalism of many Garfagnini and the role of campanilismo (loyalty to one’s home village) in sustaining emigrants abroad.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Sorce Keller, Marcello Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13080 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Thoughts on Music and Migration Sorce Keller, Marcello; Barwick, Linda Music is always significant to human beings everywhere. Such diverse social phenomena as religion, power structure, class structure or family relations are to some extent expressed, mirrored, reinforced, exhibited—or even flaunted—through the social use of sound. And just like all these other social phenomena, music is always in a state of flux, with new generations of music-makers, audiences, technologies and social contexts spurring new musical creations and forms, and adapting or supplanting old ones. Migration is a similarly universal phenomenon. The history of humanity is a history of migrations. Migratory peoples tend to take their music along with them, especially if there are sufficient numbers of them to sustain its practice in a social context, and even if they do not , that fact in itself can help us to understand some important features of the originating and host societies, and the role of the migrants in relation to them. The study of music in migratory contexts may thus be crucial to the study of musical cultures in general. The experience of migration does not make music any less relevant in the lives of the emigrants, and the study of musical attitudes, tastes, practices (and their progressive reshaping over time) may help us to understand how easy or difficult it is for migrants to strike a balance between assimilation, co-habitation (with other groups) and the maintenance of distinctive cultural traits.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Sorce Keller, Marcello https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13076 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Transnational Perspectives on Italy in Australia's Musical Landscape Barwick, Linda; Sorce Keller, Marcello A transnational perspective is needed to understand not only the nature and development of the migratory flow of Italian people to Australia, but also the ongoing interactions of Italians in Australia with families in Italy and elsewhere in the diaspora. This chapter provides background to the papers contained in the rest of the volume, which address many different dimensions of the musical role of Italian immigrants in Australia. After providing an overview of the characteristic features of Italian immigration to Australia, including the predominance of immigration from poor peasant backgrounds, the chapter provides a framework for understanding the diversity of musical expressions of Italianness in the Australian context.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13078 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Italian Traditional Music in Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s Barwick, Linda A version of this chapter was originally presented at the Second National Folklore Conference in Sydney in October 1986, responding to the conference theme “multicultural influences upon the Australian folk heritage”. This version of the paper presented here has been substantially updated with references to published research that has appeared since its original presentation. The paper addresses three questions: • In what sense it is useful to talk about “the Australian folk heritage” in the singular? • In what avenues might any “multicultural” influences operate? • How would it be possible to identify such influences after the event? Italy has a number of historical and geographical features that make its traditional popular culture extremely diverse. Political unification did not occur until 1861, and the national language remained largely literary and bureaucratic in use until the twentieth century. Because of this relatively recent political and linguistic unification of the country, regional cultures characterised by diverse dialects and rich oral traditions thrived until quite recently, when the impact of mass media began increasingly to overwhelm the underlying cultural diversity. Some aspects of these traditions have survived more strongly in Australia than in Italy because of lack of competition from the national language, while others have died out due to changes in social structures in Australia.

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda O'Keeffe, Isabel Singer, Ruth https://hdl.handle.net/2123/13075 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Dilemmas in interpretation: contemporary perspectives on Berndt’s Goulburn Island song documentation Barwick, Linda; O'Keeffe, Isabel; Singer, Ruth More than fifty years after the first recording session and twenty-six years after the original publication of Ronald Berndt’s article ‘Other creatures in human guise’ (Berndt, 1987), this paper presents some contemporary perspectives on his documentation of Marrwakara and Kaddikkaddik songs in Warruwi (Goulburn Island) in 1961 and 1964. Several puzzling features emerge from close attention to the documentation, some of which may now never be fully resolved. The authors (in particular O’Keeffe and Singer) undertook further documentation of these and many other archival songs in the period 2006-2012 as part of a larger research project on Western Arnhem Land song led by Barwick and funded by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. We situate the Berndt song documentation in the broader context of the public ceremonial dance-song genre (known as manyarti in Mawng, or kun-borrk in Kunwinjku) that was the main focus of our project’s efforts, reflect on the significance of Berndt’s work, and provide re-transcriptions of the song texts, transliterating as relevant into contemporary Mawng orthography, and showing organisation of the text words into lines of verse, usually regularly repeated to form the sung version. This is a postprint of the original publication (authors' final version) with page numbers adjusted to match those of the publication.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Treloyn, Sally Googninda Charles, Rona https://hdl.handle.net/2123/12254 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2014-11-11T00:00:00Z

Repatriation and innovation: the impact of archival recordings on endangered dance-song traditions and ethnomusicological research Treloyn, Sally; Googninda Charles, Rona For some time, ethnomusicologists working in Australian Aboriginal communities have repatriated and disseminated audio and video recordings from archival and personal collections to cultural heritage communities as a primary fieldwork method. Increasingly researchers are documenting these processes and are considering the complexities of repatriation and dissemination, and their role in supporting creative innovation and in sustaining performance traditions. As such, while we consider the contexts in which archival materials influence and may be used to innovate endangered song traditions, we might likewise consider ways in which the process of returning materials influences and innovates fieldwork and research. This paper will outline the materials and processes of repatriation involved in the Australian Research Council project 'Strategies for Preserving and Sustaining Endangered Song and Dance in the modern world: the Mowanjum and Fitzroy River Valley communities of WA'. The paper will present perspectives from both cultural heritage stakeholders and researchers on the role of repatriation of archival materials in: fostering partnerships between researchers and communities; in supporting the capacity of local organizations; in supporting intergenerational engagement around dance-song knowledge; and, in better understanding the intersections and tensions between traditional systems of knowledge management and dissemination, local community archives, and national archives.

2014-11-11T00:00:00Z Withers, Peter https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9850 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

KinOath Kinship Archiver Version 1.4 Withers, Peter This talk will introduce a new tool for Humanities research, in particular Ethnology, Linguistics, Law, History, but also Genetics and Archiving. This tool is KinOath Kinship Archiver which is an application for collecting and analysing kinship data. It is designed to be flexible and culturally nonspecific, which is important to prevent extraneous concepts being imposed onto the data being recorded. The kinship data can be linked to external resources such as archive data. Graphical representation of the data is a key feature, it produces publishable quality diagrams that can be exported to SVG, PDF and JPG formats. Data can be imported from GEDCOM, CSV and TIP files. Data can be exported into CSV format, with additional formats becoming available as plugins. KinOath provides very flexible data fields for each individual / entity recorded in the kinship data, this is combined with customisable relation types, customisable symbols and customisable kin types. This means, for example, that any number of genders and kinship relations can be defined and represented on a diagram. The most common format, GEDCOM (Family History Department, 1999), can be imported into KinOath. However this GEDCOM format exhibits cultural specificities because it has a predetermined set of kinship types, genders and initiation ceremonies. We know that there is a wider array of kinship types (e.g. suckling relations (Altorki, 1980)) and genders (e.g. the Māhū of Hawaiʻi (Matzner, 2001)). There are also initiation ceremonies beyond the Christian and Jewish ceremonies that are predefined in GEDCOM. However once this data is imported, all the flexibility of KinOath will be available. KinOath has project based diagrams and freeform diagrams. Freeform diagrams are like a quick sketch; while project diagrams each have a database of kinship data which can be shared across multiple diagrams. Project based diagrams also allow kin type string queries, such that individuals to be found based on their relations to others. Individuals in a project diagram can be duplicated and merged, which can be useful, for example, in correcting data, or merging multiple data sets where some individuals overlap. In freeform diagrams kin terms can be defined with kin type strings and shown on the diagram, organised in groups, imported and exported. In the future it will be possible to overlay these kin terms onto project diagrams. In order to perform statistical analysis, the kinship data for each project or freeform diagram can be exported for use in R or SPSS. This combined with queries based on kin types and other search parameters, provides great potential in the analysis of both the kin data and the archive data that has been recorded. The intended users of Kinoath are any researchers that collect data in a context of social relations. Kinship data is often not systematically included in the metadata of archives, however these kin relations provide a context that enriches that archived data. KinOath is in active development and new features are regularly being added. The plugin framework that KinOath shares with Arbil has made it possible for external developers to add features. The various versions and the manual are available at: http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tlatools/kinoath/ REFERENCES Family History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, 1999, THE GEDCOM STANDARD DRAFT Release 5.5.1 http://www.phpgedview.net/ged551¬5.pdf Matzner, Andrew. 2001. 'O au no keia: voices from Hawaii's Mahu and transgender communities. Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris. Altorki, Soraya. 1980. MilkKinship in Arab Society: An Unexplored Problem in the Ethnography of Marriage. Ethnology 19(2): 233-244

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Holton, Gary https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9835 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Thanks for not throwing that away: How archival data (unexpectedly) inform the linguistic and ethnographic record Holton, Gary Witnessing the explosion in the amount of digital data over the past decade many authors have concluded that not everything can be preserved, that we must instead develop strategies for prioritizing objects for digital preservation (Ooghe and Moreels 2009). Digital language archives have been at least partly immune to these arguments, owing both to the nature of the data they preserve and to their status as early adopters. From the outset language archives have worked closely with the documentary linguistics community to develop standards for data portability which greatly simplify preservation and access (Bird and Simons 2003). The products of modern language documentation are by design much easier to archive than, say, eBooks or video games. Moreover, digital language archives have generally had privileged access to large computing infrastructures, often through particular arrangements with cyber-infrastructure built for hard science data storage and analyses. As digital archiving comes of age and digital language archives are brought within the fold of larger digital preservation efforts, the pressure to prioritize preservation goals will increase. Before we decide to discard materials as superfluous, it is useful to consider some of the ways language archives are being used. In this paper I review some current uses of materials housed at the Alaska Native Language Archive (ANLA). Though designed exclusively as a repository of linguistic knowledge, ANLA is now increasingly recognized by its user community as a rich source of ethnographic information. Language documentation is for the most part a holistic effort, and though language documenters may not be specialists in topics such as botany, kinship, or geography, they are often the only ones to record this knowledge. Hence the value of language archives as repositories of traditional knowledge. Of course, ANLA is also a rich source of more traditional linguistic documentation. This is not surprising in cases where little or no published documentation exists. However, increasingly we are discovering important information which was excluded from published reference works, ostensibly because it was not thought to be important at the time. Archival documents have revealed errors and oversights in the published records for even the most well-documented Alaskan languages. While anecdotal, these experiences demonstrate the value of preserving all linguistic data, even in cases where good published documentation exists. Digital language archives must resist pressure from the wider library and archives community to prioritize preservation efforts and triage collection. Fortunately, digital language archives are already ahead of the curve, having developed inter-institutional frameworks which stress regional focus and avoid duplication of preservation efforts (Barwick 2004, AIMS Working Group 2012). On this tenth anniversary of PARADISEC it is encouraging to note the great progress which has been made in the development of digital ethnographic archives; however, we must also be prepared for a new era in which digital archiving is a quotidian effort and we face increasing pressure to discard materials. References AIMS Working Group. 2012. AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship. Barwick, Linda. 2004. Turning It All Upside Down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive. Literary and Linguistic Computing 19.253-63. Bird, Steven and Gary Simons. 2003. Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description. Language 79(3).557-82. Ooghe, Bart, Heritage Cell Waasland and Dries Moreels. 2009. Analysing selection for digitisation. D-Lib Magazine 15(9/10).1082-9873

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Szakos, Jozsef Glavitsch, Ulrike https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9855 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Like a “Swiss knife which cuts in two directions”: On the development and use of SpeechIndexer as a documentation and teaching tool Szakos, Jozsef; Glavitsch, Ulrike SpeechIndexer has been developed for language documentation and learning at the ETH in Zurich. Its original goal was to help access the archive recordings of endangered Austronesian languages of Taiwan. In later years, it was more and more applied to preparing teaching materials not only for Austronesian languages, but to help organize and retrieve authentic speech materials of other modern languages. Starting from the precise indexing and retrieval of single speakers, it has grown into a small but complex tool which can deal with multiple speakers and indexing of overlapping speech segments. There have been several challenges: (1) it was necessary to find an optimal coding of the speech participants in recordings and a retrieval mechanism of participants' speech peculiarities and (2) we have to deal with overlaps in the speech of participants. Overlaps are unnoticed by the system, since the pause-finding algorithm looks for silence breaks for suggesting phrase units. A speech extract where multiple speakers are talking simultaneously is segmented into a single speech segment if there are no obvious pauses. A mechanism that filters out the various speakers' voices that can be individually indexed is the long-term goal. A way of marking speaker overlaps is the realistic short- or medium-term goal. Our presentation introduces the solution we developed for the encoding scheme of speech participants and the respective retrieval of their speech characteristics. Furthermore, we show the marking system we have devised for overlaps. Further disambiguation research is needed to find out the respective types of overlaps in individual speech acts. An indexing possibility is to be provided still, and we are further working on this problem. Finally, we demonstrate on some Formosan Indigenous Languages materials, where SpeechIndexer is used as a tool to build textbooks, how the multiple speakers' linear indexing is one more powerful asset to choose this software for concordancing speech corpora and integrating them into advanced learners' textbooks and multimedia materials. In teaching dialogues by authentic recordings (dialogues, discussions, drama, theater) selectively speaker's voices can be silence and the learner can practice, playing that part. Documentation and language teaching are kept at a distance by academic and educational institutions. We still believe, however that they are but two sides of the same coin, they all deal with the same authentic language materials, therefore the SpeechIndexer software can help by simultaneously satisfying both needs.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Birch, Bruce https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9858 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

The Ma! Project: Crowdsourcing Software for Language Documentation Birch, Bruce The Ma! Project's (themaproject.org/‎) first app + database package is a crowdsourcing lexicon development system consisting of a smartphone/tablet app which allows users to sync audio, video, text and image data to an online database for the purposes of building dictionaries. Synced data is curated via an online moderator control panel. Approved user contributions are used as the basis for new entries, or for modification of existing entries, which are then published to the app. The next time any user syncs, the new or modified entries will be added to the dictionary on their device. The project aims to engage younger speakers of endangered languages in the documentation process. The app has been made available for Android and iOS. So far we have piloted in three endangered language contexts: Iwaidja (Northern Australia); Mokpe (Cameroon); and Bena Bena (PNG). We are currently developing versions for Gamilaraay (NSW), Somali, and the 17 languages used by the Darwin-based Aboriginal Interpreter Service, all of which are expected to be operational by the end of 2013. The presentation will consist of a live demonstration of the app and moderator control panel. For those wishing to preview the app, search for 'Ma Iwaidja' on Google Play or the App Store.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Musgrave, Simon Hajek, John https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9847 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Linguistic scholarship in the data-driven 21st century Musgrave, Simon; Hajek, John Linguistic scholarship in the data‐driven 21st century Two important forces have been acting on the discipline of linguistics since late in the twentieth century: technological changes which allow the capture and dissemination of high quality multimedia data efficiently and at a reasonable cost, and an emphasis on the collection of primary data as a response to deep concerns about the reduction of linguistic diversity across the world. The convergence and interaction of these two forces is driving changes to scholarly practice in the discipline. With an organisation such as PARADISEC celebrating its tenth anniversary, we can identify some aspects of those changes which are stabilising and it is therefore possible to speculate in an informed fashion about what linguistic scholarship will look like in the coming decades and to consider the implications. In this paper, we will argue that there are implications for technical infrastructure which are being addressed at least to some extent, but that the implications for the social infrastructure of our discipline, particularly channels of dissemination for scholarly work, are much more profound and are not yet being adequately addressed. We suggest that 21st century linguistics will be increasingly based on access to primary data. By this we mean access at all stages of the process of scholarship: access to shared data in well‐organised repositories as well as the possibility of directly citing data in our publications. The infrastructure for archiving exists (witness PARADISEC); additional elements such as servers which allow clients to address specified segments of media files on demand are being discussed and developed (RNLD List April 2013). On the other hand, the less tangible infrastructure to support these changes is not yet so prominent. Direct citation of primary data means moving fully to electronic publishing; by this we mean not merely making work available online in a format such as pdf, but reconceptualising our forms of scholarly communication as essentially freed from text on paper. This in turn implies a reworking of the systems of gate‐keeping and prestige which are associated with the current publication models, and such changes must also include the recognition of the deposit of properly curated data as an accepted part of scholarship. Moves in these directions have begun: last year saw the appearance of a volume devoted to the topic of electronic grammaticography (Nordhoff 2012), and the Australia Linguistic Society is engaged in a dialogue with the Australia Research Council about the recognition of data deposits as research outputs (Thieberger, Margetts, Morey, Musgrave and Schembri 2012). We suggest that the benefits of a linguistics which is closely linked to primary data are evident and moves in this direction are therefore inevitable. But the concomitant changes to the institutional structures of scholarship will be profound and complex. References: Nordhoff, Sebastian (ed.). 2012. Electronic Grammaticography. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press. Thieberger, Nick, Anna Margetts, Stephen Morey, Simon Musgrave and Adam Schembri. 2012. Assessing curated corpora as research output. Paper presented to the 2012 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, University of Western Australia, November 2012.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Musgrave, Simon Barwick, Linda Walsh, Michael Treloar, Andrew https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9839 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Language Identifying Codes: Remaining Issues, Future Prospects Musgrave, Simon; Barwick, Linda; Walsh, Michael; Treloar, Andrew The work of organisations such as PARADISEC is crucially dependent on accurate and reliable identification of the languages which are represented in resources. For efficient discovery of resources to be possible, an identifying system which is accurate and stable in itself is necessary, as is wide agreement to use the system across the relevant communities (archivists and researchers from various disciplines). ISO 639‐3 is such a system and acceptance of it is now widespread; this should not, however, be taken as meaning that no problems remain and in this paper we draw attention to some of the remaining issues and the potential role of Australian researchers in working towards their solution. ISO 639‐3 reflects the reality of language differentiation more or less accurately depending on the region in question. A process for requesting revisions to the codes exists and is being used quite extensively by scholars working on Australian languages. The experience thus being accumulated will be of value in future work on language identification. This process also draws attention to another area where improvement can be made: currently, the different parts of ISO 639 (639‐1, 639‐ 2 etc.) have different registration authorities. Bringing all parts of the standard together under a single registration authority would have benefits for ongoing revisions and for transparency and is therefore an important goal. Another important goal is to ensure that linguists are able to provide input to three parts of ISO 639 currently being developed: • ISO 639‐5 a proposed set of codes for identifying groupings above the level of the single language, • ISO 639‐6 a proposed set of codes for identifying linguistic entities below the level of the single language, • ISO 639‐4 will provide an account of the principles on which the various codings rest. Australia is represented in ISO by Standards Australia, and this body has observer status in relation to ISO Technical Committee 37 which is responsible for the 639 group of standards. A group of interested scholars in Australia constitute an informal reference group for these issues (ARGILaRe: http://users.monash.edu.au/~smusgrav/ARGILaRe/) and this group is establishing ways to provide expert input. These include the establishment of a mirror committee for TC37 under the ambit of Standards Australia, ongoing involvement with international projects and endeavours, and the potential formation of a Working Group within the Research Data Alliance framework. The goal of improving access to language resources should be one which unites various research communities and therefore we are optimistic that such endeavours can and will produce valuable results.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Bow, Cathy https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9846 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Mobilising the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages Bow, Cathy Originally started through an impetus to preserve thousands of books produced in Aboriginal languages during the years of bilingual education in the Northern Territory, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages (www.cdu.edu.au/laal) has the basic structure of a traditional archive. However those involved in its development – academics, linguists, educators, language owners and literacy workers – are concerned at each step to develop structures and strategies whereby local knowledge and language authorities can supervise the development and use of their own collections. This goal is in part to provide resources for ongoing language and culture work at the local level (in schools and the wider community), but also to connect interested researchers worldwide with the knowledge authorities who can speak for and enrich the collection through collaborative research. This presentation will consider the work involved in negotiating the structural arrangements within the emerging archive, as well as some of the technical, social and political aspects involved in bringing the archive to life in the 20 communities of origin in conjunction with the 25+ language groups whose literature is represented in the archive.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Monaghan, Paul https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9840 2026-05-04T06:57:26Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Towards a Nhangga hermeneutic: breathing life into written archival materials Monaghan, Paul This paper is concerned with issues arising from the translation of a dreaming story from English/Aboriginal English back into an extremely endangered Aboriginal language. The story of Bilarl (Sooty Bell Magpie) was recorded by Daisy Bates in the early years of the twentieth century during her time at Eucla (WA) or Fowlers Bay (SA). The story was uncovered in the Daisy Bates Collection as the Barr Smith Library and was translated by a group of Wirangu people (Nhanggas) and the author at Ceduna (SA) in 2011. The translation process, the first attempted for the Wirangu language, revealed a number of surprises relating to what I call a Nhangga hermeneutic. That is, the way that Wirangu people perform the task of translating into their heritage language reflects local ways of making meaning that differ substantially from methods informed by normative literacy practices. In outlining this hermeneutic, this paper explores the processes of liberating oral narratives from written documents.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Withers, Peter https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9849 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

New Developments in Arbil Metadata Manager Withers, Peter This talk will introduce Arbil which is a tool for managing metadata that describes research data, such as audio or video files, allowing research data files to be easily searched both before and after they are archived. Arbil has been developed at The Language Archive at MPIPL (Author, 2012) and was originally designed for the DOBES community to replace the IMDI Editor. The core needs expressed by this group was viewing and editing the metadata when in the field and being able to edit more than one metadata file at once. Indeed, Arbil is fully functional offline, provides tabular editing, and for robustness stores only text metadata files. For moving metadata and associated resources into an LAT archive, the structure is exported from Arbil and then uploaded into LAMUS (Broeder et al., 2006). Arbil was originally designed to support IMDI metadata (Broeder and Wittenburg, 2006). This format has been in use for many years, and it covers most needs with a number of set fields, but also may confuse researchers and slow down the workflow with so many fields to fill in. This issue has been addressed by CLARIN (Va ́radi et al., 2008). CLARIN provides flexible metadata fields, allowing a custom profile to be designed for each project ¬ only the relevant metadata fields need to be offered to the end user, greatly simplifying the process of creating metadata. Arbil has now been updated to support both IMDI and Clarin metadata formats. Because of the flexible design of Arbil, some of its components such as the metadata table and tree have been utilised in KinOath Kinship Archiver (Author, 2011). This application builds on the core functions of Arbil, onto which it adds an XML database to provide fast searches. Also, a plugin layer has been introduced in KinOath which has been migrated back into Arbil. Another project that is in the prototype stage is a web based search similar to the search in Arbil. These changes are being combined together as a search plugin for Arbil which is in development that will allow much more powerful searches to be available without compromising the original design of the application. References Author. 2012. Metadata Management with Arbil. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference On Language Resources And Evaluation (LREC 2012) Satellite Workshops, pages 72–75. Istanbul. http://www.lrec¬conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/11.LREC2012%20Metadata%20Proceedin gs.pdf Author. 2011. KinOath, Kinship Software Beta Stage of Development. Talk presented at Atelier d’initiation au traitement informatique de la parenté. salle 3, RdC, bât. Le France. 2011¬12¬16. D. Broeder and P. Wittenburg. 2006. The IMDI metadata framework, its current application and future direction. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 1(2), pages 119–132. T. Váradi, S. Krauwer, P. Wittenburg, M. Wynne, and K. Koskenniemi. 2008. Clarin: Common language resources and technology infrastructure. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), pages 1244–1248, Marrakech. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). http://www.lrecconf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/317_paper.pdf. D. Broeder, A. Claus, F. Offenga, R. Skiba, P. Trilsbeek, and P. Wittenburg. 2006. LAMUS : the Language Archive Management and Upload System. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), pages 2291–2294, Genoa. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). www.latmpi.eu/papers/papers 2006/lamuspaperfinal2.pdf

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Drapeau, Lynn Lambert-Brétière, Renée https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9834 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Making the most out of the past: Retrieving and archiving old records of the Innu language Drapeau, Lynn; Lambert-Brétière, Renée In a situation of language endangerment, communities express a strong need for the documentation and preservation of their language which is increasingly threatened as the older generations of monolinguals pass away. This paper presents the documentation project of Innu, an endangered Algonquian language spoken by roughly 13,000 people in 11 communities spread out over Northeastern Quebec and Labrador in Canada. It will specifically address the issues related to retrieving and converting a large body of existing linguistic materials into digital format, and making old language records available for the benefit of the people in their efforts of revitalization. Since the beginning of the 20th century, hydroelectric, mining and forestry projects are undertaken on the ancestral lands of the Innus. Many of these projects were carried out without their consent. However, since the late seventies, strategies for successful negotiations with government and private developers include discussions with the Innus to ensure a constructive dialogue with the province's economic development partners. Innu Elders play a critical role in these exercises by providing traditional ecological knowledge, e.g. about waterways, and documenting where people hunt, fish, trap, gather and camp. The outcome of these surveys constitutes precious information about the Innu culture, traditions, as well as language, since many of the Elders were monolinguals. As an illustration, in the early eighties, the Attikamek-Innu Council led a major investigation on territorial use and occupancy. The collected material comprises the testimony of more than 400 Innus and over one thousand hours of recordings. This documentation and all other existing analog records are precious for the collective memory and history of the Innu communities, and need to be located, retrieved, digitalised, and archived for the long-term sustainability of the language. We undertook this enterprise in partnership with the Innu Cultural Institute. With the constitution of an archive comprising old records and original materials, the Innu language documentation project aims to make an important contribution to the ongoing developments in language documentation research and a major step in building a valuable tool for language maintenance and revitalization.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Barwick, Linda Harris, Amanda https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9833 2026-05-04T06:57:25Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

PARADISEC: its history and future Barwick, Linda; Harris, Amanda Founded in 2003 by a team of linguists and musicologists at the University of Sydney, Australian National University and the University of Melbourne, the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures is now celebrating its ten-year anniversary. In the first decade of operation, PARADISEC created an archive of more than 3000 hours of audio recordings of language and music recordings from the Pacific, Asia and beyond. The digital collection now contains over 6 TB of data with a queue of audio, video and image files still to be ingested into the archive, and PARADISEC was recently included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. In this presentation, we will trace the development of PARADISEC from its origins as a storage facility for precious research data. We will discuss the ways that uses of the archive have grown and changed over the years, and reflect on prospects for PARADISEC's future in a fragile funding environment.

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z Berez, Andrea https://hdl.handle.net/2123/9836 2026-05-04T06:57:27Z 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z

Integrating archiving into the Language Documentation curriculum at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Berez, Andrea The language documentation and conservation (LD&C) track in the Master of Arts program in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa (UHM) is unique in the United States and one of only a small handful of graduate programs in the world offering advanced degrees in the documentation of endangered languages. A key component of the program is the integration of the Kaipuleohone University of Hawai‘i Digital Ethnographic Archive into the curriculum.1 This paper discusses the development of Kaipuleohone and its increasing role in the professional development of students in the LD&C program at UHM. Kaipuleohone was started in 2008 by Nick Thieberger (Albarillo & Thieberger 2009). The original mission of the archive was to provide a permanent secure home for digitized language recordings from scholars affiliated with UHM over the five decades since the Department of Linguistics was created. During the first phase of Kaipuleohone, hundreds of recordings from eminent field linguists like Derek Bickerton and Robert Blust, as well as the collection of the Charlene Sato Center for Pidgin, Creole and Dialect Studies, were digitized and ingested. Now in its second phase, Kaipuleohone has increasingly become an archive for materials actively being collected, especially by students in the LD&C program. The core curriculum stresses the importance of archiving in the language documentation workflow, and Kaipuleohone provides an opportunity for students to develop good habits of consistent metadata collection and regular deposit, even from the field. Students are required to consider issues surrounding data longevity, access, and multipurpose value early in their careers, better preparing them for achieving the best practices of contemporary language documentation as professionals. In addition, good archiving practices among our students allows us to require the proper citation of documentary source materials in doctoral theses via permanent handles, furthering the scientific goal that linguistic claims be verifiable by data, and thus increasing the quality of scholarship in the Department. Kaipuleohone conforms to international archiving standards for digital archives. Audio files are stored at high resolution and the metadata conforms to the Open Language Archives Community, Open Archives Initiative and Dublin Core. All digital files are curated by the Library system at the University of Hawa‘i’s D-Space repository, ScholarSpace. Reference Albarillo, Emily A. & Nick Thieberger. 2009. Kaipuleohone, the University of Hawai‘i’s Digital Ethnographic Archive. Language Documentation & Conservation 3(1): 1-14. 1 Kaipuleohone is Hawaiian for ‘gourd of sweet words’. We are grateful to Laiana Wong for suggesting this name and for allowing us to use it as the name of this archive

2013-01-01T00:00:00Z