Digital documentation of Ju|'hoan language and culture: field reseaerch for audio, video and text archives

The Endangered Language Documentation Programme (ELDP) provides grants worldwide to for the linguistic documentation of endangered language and knowledge. Grantees create multimedia collection of endangered languages. These collections are preserved and made freely available through the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) housed at the library of SOAS University of London.

This project in digital documentation of Jul'hoan San language and culture is the culmination of 37 years of audio/video recording and language activism by anthropologist Megan Biesele, Jul'hoan trainees, and linguistic consultants. Fostering linguistic analysis of Jul'hoan, it centrally supports field documentation and processing of an extensive collection of verbal art, healing narratives, and political negotiation to create a responsibly archived, web-disseminated resource for linguists, anthropologists, and Jul'hoan people. Easily navigable, the resource will allow indexing/search by outside search engines; conform to OLAC standards for metadata tagging; and provide linguistic annotation of text for both large-scale computation and manual examination. Primary investigator: Megan Biesele

Project Details


Location: Namibia, Southern Africa, Africa Organiser(s): Endangered Languages Documentation Programme Project partner(s): University of Texas at Austin Funder(s): Arcadia Funding received: £9,600.00 Commencement Date: 01/2004
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