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
Project owner? Update this project



Related Projects

EAP1402 Pub003

19th-century documents from the Peruvian asylum el Manicomio del Cercado

The Victor Larco Herrera Hospital in the centre of Lima, Peru, was closed in 1917. Its archives, dating back to 1859, consist of medical documentation as well as administrativ…

Explore project
EAP1306 Silk Museum

The Caucasian Silk Circle: Digitising Photo Collection of the State Silk Museum in Georgia

The State Silk Museum of Georgia holds the only documentary evidence of the practice of sericulture in the 19th century. Taken during expeditions of the Caucasian Sericulture …

Explore project
EAP1294 team

Safeguarding for Posterity Two Private Collections of Palm-Leaf Manuscripts from the Tamil Country

The Kalliṭaikuṟicci and Villiyampākkam collections are palm-leaf collections held privately in India. The collections are essential to study the prevalent reading practices in…

Explore project