PARADISEC - New Tools for Preserving Community Language resources in the Pacific

Click here for your local time (10.00 – 11.00am Singapore/China / 12.00noon – 1.00pm AEST Brisbane / 1.00 – 2.00pm AEDT Melb/Canb/Syd / 3.00 – 4.00pm New Zealand)

Join us to hear Nick Thieberger and the PARADISEC team showcase some of the stories of community languages being preserved in our region.

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) has operated for 24 years, finding and digitising records in the world's small languages, and providing access to those records via systems developed in response to community needs. PARADISEC currently holds materials from more than 1,400 languages contained in 21,000 hours of audio, 4,000 hours of video, and many manuscripts.

Nick and the PARADISEC team will demonstrate tools built in accordance with standards established by the Language Data Commons of Australia (LDaCA) to secure and improve access to at-risk collections in our region. These tools enable the presentation of digital collections on local, offline devices, providing access to archives for regional and remote communities where Internet connections are unreliable.

Prof Nick Thieberger is Principal Fellow of Linguistics at the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. Nick is the Director of PARADISEC, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and President of the Digital Endangered Languages and Musics Archives Network (DELAMAN). He is Deputy Director of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language at the University of Melbourne and Chief Investigator on several ARC research projects. In 2026 Nick received the Marles Medal for his work on the preservation of endangered languages.

Registration

This event is free to attend and open to both DPC Members and non-members. Click BOOK NOW below to register your place.

If you have any questions about registration, please contact Ellie O'Leary (eleanor.oleary@dpconline.org).

DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy

The DPC Community is guided by the values set out in our Strategic Plan and aims to be respectful, welcoming, inclusive and transparent. We encourage diversity in all its forms and are committed to being accessible to everyone who wishes to engage with the topic of digital preservation, whilst remaining technology and vendor neutral. We ask all those who are part of this community to be positive, accepting, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others in alignment with our DPC Inclusion & Diversity Policy.