Sustaining Traditions: Ethnomusicological Collections, Access and Sustainability in Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Researchers and collecting institutions have long been concerned with issues of sustainability and accessibility in relation to the audio and video recordings, metadata and documents that they create and manage. While early research sought to create a sustainable record of performance traditions that would be available to future generations, archives have striven to ensure that these recordings are held in durable and sustainable formats. In recent years this view of sustainability and accessibility has widened to include making records of cultural heritage discoverable and accessible to their countries and communities of origin often to support local efforts to reclaim cultural heritage materials and to sustain their traditions into the future. The potential for repatriation and research to contribute to sustaining traditions for future generations, however, is tied to an array of historical, political, economic and interpersonal factors and challenges. This article explores a range of these issues through two case studies that describe research activity and aspirations around two geographically, historically, and politically distinct ethnomusicological collections held in Australia: one a digital collection of recordings of dance-songs from the Kimberley region of northwest Australia dating from the 1960s to the present, currently the subject of a repatriation and cultural maintenance-focused research project; the other a unique collection of recordings and documents, primarily of South African Venda performance traditions that were collected by John Blacking in the 1950s and that are held in the Callaway Centre at the University of Western Australia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".