The workshop at Divine Word University was run in a two-day intensive mode, on Friday afternoon and all day Saturday. Thirty two staff and students, plus two PBT staff, representing some 20 languages, joined in the Friday session and learnt how to explain the goals of language preservation to tokples speakers, how to operate voice recorders, and how to log the recordings. About a third of the undergraduate students only had the ability to hear their tokples, and were unable to speak it. Few participants had heard that Madang Province has a greater density of languages than just about anywhere else on the planet. Dr Anastasia Sai, the local organiser, runs an oral history course in the Department of PNG Studies, in which students collect folklore from local languages. A recent student project opened with a powerful statement affirming the importance of language preservation (see the Advocacy page), and so we opened the workshop with this statement. After a series of presentations and practical exercises, participants were asked to take a recorder and notebook, and try to collect a narrative and a dialogue that evening. The Saturday full-day session covered oral annotation and transcription. We lost the first year students, and mostly had staff and the oral history students. Everyone did well in learning the methods, and several were called upon to demonstrate in front of the class. Due to the unavailability of internet access for most participants, the uploading methods were demonstrated and not practiced by all. Some photos are posted here. Saturday lunchtime was an opportunity for the senior executive of DWU to hear about the project. Fr Jan Czuba expressed gratitude for the workshop and welcomed further cooperation in future. Interestingly, Dr Sai already had 9 digital voice recorders for use in her oral history course, although this was not enough for the 27 enrolled students to take out. Now that the department has 32 new recorders, a class set, the students will be able to borrow them for use over the mid-year break, in preparation for the course which runs in the second half of the year. |
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Madang Workshopposted Feb 14, 2010 7:16 PM by Steven Bird [ updated Feb 14, 2010 7:42 PM ] |