Community-Led Documentation of Nafsan (Erakor, Vanuatu)

Abstract

We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain documentation of Nafsan, the local indigenous language. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data, and give an overview of the outcomes of a community-led documentation after initial training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of project from the perspective of the community researchers and the external linguists. We show that community-led documentation such as this project in Erakor, in which data management and archiving ar..