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Haimendorf's Laptop
An Ethnographic Archive
in the Digital Age
Digital Himalaya is a pilot
project to develop digital collection, archiving, and distribution strategies
for multimedia anthropological information from the Himalayan region.
Based at the University of Cambridge in the UK, the project commenced
in December 2000. In the initial phase, we are digitizing a set of existing
ethnographic archives comprised of photographs, films, sound recordings,
field notes, and texts collected by anthropologists and travellers in
Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Indian Himalayas (including Sikkim) from
the beginning of the twentieth century to the present.
Chorten
at Gyantse Monastery, 14.10.33 Gyantse, Tibet.
Picture taken by SIR FREDERICK WILLIAMSON
* By SARA SHNEIDERMAN & MARK TURIN
The project has three long-term objectives.
The first is to preserve, in a digital medium, valuable ethnographic materials
that are degenerating in their current forms. The second is to make these
resources available in a searchable digital format to scholars and to
the Himalayan communities from which the materials were collected. Lastly,
we need to develop a template for collaborative digital cataloguing that
will allow users to contribute documentation to existing collections and
eventually link their own collections to the system, creating a dynamic
tool for comparative research
Collections
TIBETOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES
SERIES
The Tibetological Collections &
Archives Series is devoted to important projects on cataloguing,
'computerization' (inputting and scanning), editing, and translation
of important Tibetan language text-collections and archives.
In this series various colleagues briefly present their initiatives
to a larger public, or update the scholarly world on the progress
of their already well-established projects. Some are high-profile
projects, of which at least Tibetologists will generally be
aware, yet some may also be less well known. Nevertheless, I
trust that it will be useful to be informed or updated on all
these initiatives and I also hope that the projects presented
will profit from the exposure and the response that this coverage
will engender. If you are interested in any of the projects
described, feel free to contact the author of the article. In
case you would like to introduce your own (planned) work in
the field, please contact the editors of the IIAS
Newsletter or the author of this introduction. We
should very much like to encourage our contributors to keep
us informed on the progress of their projects by regular updates.
The sixth contribution to this series
consists of two articles: in 'Haimendorf's Laptop' Sara Shneiderman
and Mark Turin treat the Digital Himalayan Project and Anthony
Farrington describes the new microfiche edition of India Office
files on relations between 'Britain, China and Tibet, 1904-1950'.
HENK
BLEZER
Research
fellow at the IIAS
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The five collections that are involved in the first phase
of the project have been selected on their historical value and their
coverage of diverse geographical areas and ethnic peoples of the Himalayan
region. This region we have broadly defined to reach from Ladakh and Kashmir
in the west to Arunachal Pradesh and Assam in the east, and from the Tibetan
plateau in the north to the Himalayan foothills in the south. For these
collections, we use a wide range of original recording media. These include:
nitrate photographic film, 35mm monochrome and colour film, 8mm, Super8,
and 16mm moving film, U-Matic, VHS, Hi-8, and 1-inch videotape, and a
number of digital formats including DVMini and DVCam digital video, and
TIFF and JPEG still images.
Of these five collections, three are finite, historical resources, while
the latter two are ongoing collections that continue to grow. Depending
on the success of this initial phase, the project may expand to include
other high quality archives. The five collections are:
a. the Williamson
Photographic Archive: 1,700 photographs taken between 1930
and 1935 by the British Political Officer Sir Frederick Williamson in
Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan. Williamson's collection is now held in the
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge,
and includes a number of rare historic images.
b. the Fürer-Haimendorf
Film Collection: over 100 hours of 16mm film from various parts
of the central and eastern Himalayas shot between 1936 and 1980 by Christoph
von Fürer-Haimendorf, Professor of Anthropology at SOAS. The films
are supplemented by Haimendorf's detailed field diaries.
c. the Naga
Videodisc: part of Haimendorf's film archive overlaps with
a large ethnographic collection relating to the Naga peoples of Northeast
India and parts of Burma, principally collected by five different anthropologists
and travellers. These materials were compiled as an analogue videodisc
in the 1980s, and included some 10,000 photographs, a large number of
film and sound clips, and original fieldwork diaries and notes in an associated
database. This system is now technologically obsolete, and we hope to
re-release it in a digital format.
d. the Thak
Archive: materials from a study of the Gurung village of Thak,
central Nepal, including over 100 hours of film, more than 3,000 photographs,
and continuous censuses and field notes covering the period 1968 to the
present, collected by Alan Macfarlane and Sarah Harrison.
e. the Thangmi
Archive, comprised of digital video, photographs, and ethnographic
data from the Thangmi communities of Dolakha and Sindhupalcok districts
in northeast Nepal collected by Mark Turin and Sara Shneiderman between
1996 and the present.
Technologies
& methodologies
There are three aspects to the project, each requiring a
different set of technologies. Digitization is the first step: scanning
photographic prints, negatives and slides, creating digital master copies
of film and video through telecine projection and other analogue-to-digital
conversion processes, and storing these masters in high resolution digital
formats. The second step is data management and interface design. The
third step concerns questions of storage and distribution: should all
of the materials be available via the Internet? Should we opt for DVD
(Digital Versatile Disc)? How will different users respond to each format?
Furthermore, we must think ahead to assure that the digital format in
which we archive films and photographs can be migrated to new platforms
as technology develops, hopefully avoiding the problems of obsolescence
that have plagued previous ethnographic archiving projects.
Digitizing the diverse moving and still images included within the
Digital Himalaya collections -- the essential first step in preserving
original materials -- presents substantial challenges and necessitates
an array of technological approaches. Many of the 16mm films in the
Fürer-Haimendorf collection are deteriorating and require immediate
attention. Recently, a digitization system has been set up at Cambridge
which allows efficient transfers of 16mm material on to digital master
tapes. The Thak Collection films mostly originate on Hi-8, and videos
from the 1980s have already suffered substantial quality loss. At present,
over 50 hours of the Thak material has been transferred to digital master
tapes.  The
Williamson photographs are preserved and mounted in original photo-albums
and cannot be scanned with a normal flatbed scanner. Instead, they must
be digitally re-photographed. A set of 16mm films shot by Williamson
have also come to light, and we hope to include these in the project,
using the same digitization techniques that are currently being used
for the Haimendorf films.
A Thangmi village
Regarding data management and distribution, Digital Himalaya
is exploring options for a comprehensive, end-user system that will allow
portions of each collection to be accessed on the Internet, while making
full compilations available on DVD. As a physical object, a DVD is a self-contained
portable resource, which requires neither high-speed Internet access nor
even a computer. With the advent of small battery-operated DVD-Video players,
it is now possible to play DVDs in areas with no infrastructure or electricity
supply. In the place of complicated keyboard and mouse controls, DVD players
are controlled with simple TV-style buttons. A DVD-based archive may provide
better access to non-literate users by offering limited interactivity
and higher quality playable content making use of voice-overs in local
languages instead of text.
Recently, new convergent strategies integrating the best
of both Internet and DVD have emerged. With the advent of low-cost consumer
DVD-burners and associated authoring software, searchable databases can
be made available online along with low resolution film clips and photos,
from which users would then order a custom DVD complete with relevant
voice-overs. The film clips on the DVD will have embedded URLs, and when
viewed on a computer will become active, enabling the user to link back
to the relevant database information online. An online annotation feature
will allow members of the communities from which the material originated,
or scholars, or both, to add new or corrected information about individuals,
rituals, or historical events, which could then be incorporated into the
database documentation for that particular item. In areas where Internet
access is unavailable, DVD-only versions of the archive could be compiled
and installed, and comments sent by post.
Digital Himalaya is collaborating with many research partners
to develop and adopt the most appropriate set of software systems. By
participating in multi-partner projects like the Electronic Cultural Atlas
Initiative (University of California) and the Tibetan and Himalayan Digital
Library (University of Virginia), Digital Himalaya aims to provide a wide
access to Himalayan materials. It seeks to facilitate access for a broad
range of scholars and members of the general public, in addition to that
for community members in the areas where the materials originated. The
time-depth and geographical breadth of Digital Himalaya's collections
is unique and will be of great benefit to comparative researchers, local
historians, and students. *
Digital Himalaya is supported by the Anthropologists'
Fund for Urgent Anthropological Research at the Royal Anthropological
Institute, the Renaissance Trust, the Frederick Williamson Memorial
Fund and the Crowther-Beynon Fund of the University of Cambridge Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology. The project is based at the Department
of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. An earlier version
of this article was published in the
European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, vol. 20-21, November
2001.
Sara Shneiderman MA
is currently a PhD student in anthropology at Cornell University. She
served as project manager for Digital Himalaya from fall 2000 to spring
2001, and continues to work on the Thangmi archive as part of her PhD
research, building upon original work done in Nepal as a Fulbright scholar
in Nepal in 1999-2000.
 Mark
Turin, MA is completing his grammar of the Thangmi language, spoken
in central eastern Nepal. He is currently affiliated to the Department
of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge and working in the Digital
Himalaya project.
NAL NEWS
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