The Digital Nehan Songbook Project

Abstract

The Digital Nehan Songbook project seeks to add native language songs to the broader project of describing and documenting Nehan, an Oceanic language spoken on Nissan Island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. Like virtually all other current documentation projects, the songs and accompanying texts will be made available to the Nehan community. The logistics of making "data will be made available" a meaningful concept for the Nehan community is the topic of this paper. The language is spoken on an atoll where electricity is especially scarce and therefore the community has little access to computers and no access to the internet. However, small devices such as Chinese .mp4 players are found throughout the island and some residents even own laptops which are charged by petrol generator or solar battery. Any multimedia data should be maximally small in size and easy to share and playback. Therefore, this project looks to leave the community with a nice presentation of the songbook that is appropriate considering resource limits. The solution employed in this case is to make the standard archive-quality general recordings of the Nehan songbook but also leave behind SMIL presentations of .mp3 audio for those with laptops and .lrc (lyrics file) accompanied .mp3 files for synchronised text presentations on .mp4 players. The results are highly portable multimedia with minimal file sizes. I will discuss workflow, give an overview of common software that can be used to view SMIL presentations and the types of devices that currently support .lrc coded audio and finally, report the overall success of the project.