Building Kaniaina, the Hawaiian Spoken Language Repository
FAIN: PD-255910-17
University of Hawaii, Hilo (Hilo, HI 96720-4091)
Keiki Kawaiaea (Project Director: September 2016 to October 2022)
Digitization
and transcription of approximately 550 hours of Native Hawaiian recordings and
their inclusion in a digital repository (Kani’aina) through which these and
other Hawaiian-language resources would be accessible to the public.
(edited
by staff) Against a backdrop of dire
Hawaiian language endangerment, decades of successful immersion-based language
education, and statewide interest in promoting the Hawaiian language use at
every level, along with continuing refinement of the methods of language
documentation and the technologies for preserving, disseminating, and
mobilizing four decades of documentation of spoken Hawaiian, we propose to (1)
develop Kani’aina, a digital repository for spoken Native Hawaiian that will eventually
contain an estimated 900-1200 hours of extant recordings and transcripts made accessible
through a bilingual digital library interface that is already the single
most-accessed site for Hawaiian language materials; (2) properly preserve those
digital recordings and transcripts; and (3) implement a procedure for
crowdsourced transcription of additional recordings by Hawaiian speakers. The project is based on collaboration between
language scholars and documentation and digital library/archiving specialists
at the Hilo and Manoa campuses of the University of Hawai’i.