Breathing digital life into Oceanic language corpora

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge is intimately linked to Oceanic languages and to oral or written texts produced in these languages. Primary recordings collected in the field by researchers and held as the basis of their academic publications, have long remained inaccessible to source communities. With the rise of digital archives, they can now be put online, allowing local communities to reclaim information collected from their ancestors. The songs, the performance styles, the words, the stories are all powerful links with heritage and the environment. We present here the scientific, ethical and methodological issues linked to these archives, more particularly through a presentation of the Pacific and ..