Digital Himalaya Project
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Grant Holder:
The Digital Himalaya project was designed by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. The Digital Himalaya project had three primary objectives:
1. to preserve in a digital medium archival anthropological materials from the Himalayan region that were quickly degenerating in their current forms, including films in various formats, still photographs, sound recordings, field notes, maps and rare journals
2. to make these resources available over broadband internet connections, coupled with an accurate search and retrieval system useful to contemporary researchers and students
3. to make these resources available on DVD to the descendants of the people from whom the materials were collected by making them both easily transportable and viewable in a digital medium
| Project start date: 2000-12 |
Subject domains:
Era(s):
Country/region(s):
| Methods used | Category |
|---|---|
| Resource sharing | Communication and collaboration |
| Documentation | Strategy and project management |
| Streaming media | Data publishing and dissemination |
| Curation | Strategy and project management |
| preservation | Strategy and project management |
| linguistics | Discipline |
| sound | Content types |
| moving image | Content types |
| text | Content types |
Funding sources:
British Academy, The Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) Program (US Department of Education), the Oxford Bön Project, Anthropologists' Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research at the Royal Anthropological Institute, Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund, The Crowther Beynon Fund (University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology), The Renaissance Trust, The Brendish Family Foundation, The Sager Family Traveling Foundation and Roadshow, Rashmi and Sanjay Shrestha, Andrew Clark and Mary Cobb, John R. Sanderson, Dr. Mary Shepherd Slusser, venturethree
Content types created:
Moving Image, Sound, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used:
MySQL, PHP, Finalcut Pro, Adobe Acrobat, Filemaker, Pro MS Office, QuickTime Pro, iMovie, DVD Pro iDVD, Toast, Dreamweaver, MPEG4, MPEG2, mp3, iTunes
Source material used:
The Digital Himalaya Project is digitising archival collections of ethnographic information from the Himalayan region. Five major anthropological collections were selected for digitisation in the first phase of the project to reflect a range of different media and a wide coverage of geographical areas and ethnic populations from across the Himalayas. These include the Fürer-Haimendorf Film Collection and the Frederick Williamson Collection. Alongside these visual and audio collections, we have more recently digitised an extensive set of back issues of Himalayan journals and maps and have created layered GIS maps of Nepal's 75 districts.
http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/index.php
Digital resource created:
The collections includes film, recordings, photographs and scanned copies of journals, magazines and publications of Himalayan studies for free download.
Access to digital resource:
Open Access
Data Formats created:
Apple QuickTime Movie (MOV), JPEG File Interchange Format (JPG), MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3)
Publications:
'Digitizing and Distributing Visual Footage from the Himalayas', in Nepali Aawaz, 07 December, 2006; Volume 2, Number 19, p. 21.
'A regional ethnographic archive in the digital age', in NOW! Daily, Gangtok, Sikkim, Wednesday, 01 November, 2006; Volume 5, Number 255, p. 2.
'A regional ethnographic archive in the digital age (continued)', in NOW! Daily, Gangtok, Sikkim, Thursday, 02 November, 2006; Volume 5, Number 256, p. 2.
'Digitizing and distributing visual footage from the Himalayas', in SnowLion Newsletter, Volume 17, No. 2, p. 23.
'Digitizing and distributing visual resources from the Himalayas', in South Asia Newsletter: A Publication of Cornell University's South Asia Program, Spring 2003
'Returning Footage to the Himalayas' in Viewfinder, the magazine of the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC)
'Haimendorf's laptop: An ethnographic archive in the digital age', in IIAS Newsletter, No. 26, November 2001, p. 20.
'Digital Himalaya: An Ethnographic Archive in the Digital Age', in European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EHBR), Issue 20-1, pp.136-141.
'Digital Himalaya', in Interachive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, pp. 359-361. [ISBN 3-88375-540-0]
'A regional ethnographic archive in the digital age', in NOW! Daily, Gangtok, Sikkim, Wednesday, 01 November, 2006; Volume 5, Number 255, p. 2.
'A regional ethnographic archive in the digital age (continued)', in NOW! Daily, Gangtok, Sikkim, Thursday, 02 November, 2006; Volume 5, Number 256, p. 2.
'Digitizing and distributing visual footage from the Himalayas', in SnowLion Newsletter, Volume 17, No. 2, p. 23.
'Digitizing and distributing visual resources from the Himalayas', in South Asia Newsletter: A Publication of Cornell University's South Asia Program, Spring 2003
'Returning Footage to the Himalayas' in Viewfinder, the magazine of the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC)
'Haimendorf's laptop: An ethnographic archive in the digital age', in IIAS Newsletter, No. 26, November 2001, p. 20.
'Digital Himalaya: An Ethnographic Archive in the Digital Age', in European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EHBR), Issue 20-1, pp.136-141.
'Digital Himalaya', in Interachive: Archival Practices and Sites in the Contemporary Art Field, Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, pp. 359-361. [ISBN 3-88375-540-0]
Institutions affiliated with this project:
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| University of Cambridge |
| UK HE institutions involved: |
|---|
| University of Virginia |
| Cornell University |
Project staff and expertise:
| Principal staff member: | Mark Turin, Alan Macfarlane, Daniel Ho, Komin Thami |
|---|---|
| Other staff: | |
| External expertise: |
| Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) of record | Imogen Gunn |
| Title | Digital Himalaya Project |
| Record created | 2010-06-01 |
| Record updated | 2010-06-01 17:09 |
| URL of record | http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3485 |
| Citation of record | Imogen Gunn: Digital Himalaya Project. <http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/3485> created: 2010-06-01, last updated 2010-06-01 17:09 |