About the Archive
The Recordings
The field recordings in the collection were made by Lise Dobrin between January 1998 and March 1999. Most were made on a Sony TCD-5PRO II portable analog stereo cassette recorder using Sony ECM-55B miniature electret lavalier microphones attached to a small, handmade wooden shock mount. A few of the recordings were made on a Sony TCMAP10V hand-held recorder. The quality of the recordings varies depending on the location and recording conditions. No attempt was made to avoid capturing ambient sounds.
Narratives were generally solicited. The narrator was invited to record a story for the researcher in the vernacular, with the content negotiated based on considerations such as the length of time available to make the recording, the speaker's authority over the content, and the significance of the content to the researcher's developing knowledge of Arapesh culture.
Some of the texts in the AGDLA collection were dictated by the speaker in the field and simultaneous transcribed by the researcher on paper. For ten of these texts, a digital audio version was subsequently provided by Andrew Moutu during a visit he made to Charlottesville, VA in February 2007. Moutu read the handwritten transcripts of these texts, recording them in a sound booth on a Marantz PMD 660 Digital Audio Recorder.
Further information about individual recordings can be found on the tape covers. These are accessible through the archive catalog.