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PARADISEC Sydney

PARADISEC is a cross-institutional facility whose core mission is the preservation of audiovisual materials relating to cultures from the Pacific region. For more information about PARADISEC in general, please visit the project's website.

The Sydney University Unit is PARADISEC's main operational centre, hosted by the Faculty of Arts and the School of Letters, Arts and Media (SLAM), and housed in the Department of Linguistics, second floor of the Transient Building on Fisher Road, The University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus. At this unit, we convert a range of different audiovisual media into digital formats, catalogue their metadata, securely package the digital file and archive it in our offsite repository, hosted by the National Computing Infrastrcture at ANU in Canberra.

PARADISEC Sydney's operations and projects include the archive catalogue, providing discoverable metadata for all items housed in the archive; the Transient Languages and Cultures Blog, the blog of PARADISEC and the Sydney University Linguistics Department; as well as the Murrinh Patha Song Project and 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition Project. PARADISEC is also involved in providing advice and support to researchers to ensure that their collected materials are high quality and future-proof.

PARADISEC's Sydney fileserver is named Azoulay, after the French anthropologist who was the first to promote the benefits of sound recording for research purposes.

  Azoulay, L., 1900. L'ère nouvelle des sons et des bruits. Bulletins et Memoires de la Societé d'Anthropologie de Paris 1:172-178.

  Extracted in English as 'The Future of the Phonograph,' Literary Digest 21:2 (No. 534), July 14, 1900, p. 43, and published online at http://www.phonozoic.net/n0086.htm (Accessed June 2002)

News & Events

  • Martin Thomas wins National Biography Award

    The story of how a son of Irish immigrants, R. H. Matthews, became one of Australia’s most significant early researchers of Aboriginal language, culture and history, has won the $25,000 National Biography Award, Australia’s richest prize for biographical writing and memoir, the State Library of NSW announced on Monday 14 May 2012.

    The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews, In search of an Australian Anthropologist by historian Martin Thomas, has brought to light the largely forgotten but immensely important contribution Mathews made to anthropology and Australia’s cultural history in the nineteenth century.

    Read more: State Library of NSW Media
    Sydney Morning Herald

  • Film Screening, 24 Feb: In Language We Live - Voices of the World

    February 21st is UNESCO's International Mother Language Day, and to celebrate the world's indigenous languages, RNLD, PARADISEC and the Department of Linguistics will be hosting a free screening of In Language We Live - Voices of the World on the afternoon of the 24th to coincide with the final round of OzCLO.

    Location: Education Lecture Room 424
    Date: Wednesday, February 24, 3:30 pm.

  • PARADISEC archive approaches 5TB

    National Computational Infrastructure

    PARADISEC's archive, hosted by the National Computational Infrastructure in Canberra, is soon to approach 5TB. Read more to see the full details of PARADISEC's collection held at NCI.

  • PARADISEC Wins VeRSI Prize

    PARADISEC

    In the words of the judges: "PARADISEC is an outstanding application of ICT tools in the humanities and social sciences domain that harnesses the work of scholars to store and preserve endangered language and music materials from the Asia-Pacific region and creates an online resource to make these available."

    PARADISEC has been cited as an exemplary system for audiovisual archiving using digital mass storage systems by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives and has also been included as an exemplary case study in the Australian Governmet's NCRIS Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Infrastructure.

    PARADISEC features in the Strategic Roadmap for Australian Research Culture

    The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) is an exemplary HASS capability project, undertaking digital conservation and provision of international access to research resources in audio, text and visual media on endangered cultural heritage in Indigenous Australia, the Pacific Island nations, and East and Southeast Asia. The project is known internationally for its development of low cost techniques for recording, accessioning, cataloguing and digitising complex cultural resources in digital media.... Read More (p.42)