Tag Archives: eBooks

Making a Warlpiri audiobook

This is a guest post from Barbara Martin, Samantha Watson, and Gretel Macdonald from Yuendumu School. They sent us a fantastic video produced from a book available in the Living Archive collection, and we asked them to share how they made it, so others can try as well.

Of course an audiobook can’t replace the skill of a Warlpiri teacher, but it is still a valuable resource. How did we make the audiobook…? Well we started by choosing a book that is popular with kids and adults. We had a think about how we would put the images and the text together using Adobe Spark, and decided that we wanted to add a few more images to bring this story to life. Otherwise the hungry mulyurlinji (perentie) just eats each lizard he meets and the story is all over too quickly!

That’s the great thing about making an audiobook – you can be the director and be as creative as you want to be. Once we had all the images figured out, and Barbara had learned from us younger ladies how to use an iPad along the way, we had to record our voices reading the book. This was challenging, and Barbara had to help us younger ladies to practice, and practice and practice (!) and think about the rhythm of Warlpiri, and how we would use our voices to play different characters. Now that we have made one audiobook we want to make more, and most importantly we want to get kids at Yuendumu School involved in making their own audiobooks.

 

You can also view this on the Living Archive website – go to http://laal.cdu.edu.au/record/cdu:34270/info/  and click on WATCH (go full screen to get the whole effect!) And send us your ebooks or audiobooks when you’ve created them.

Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair workshop

The weekend of 7-9 August we had the privilege of running a couple of workshops at the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair with Josh Hughes from Culture Tech.

Alex & Daniel from Maningrida

On Friday we recorded Daniel and Alex reading a frog book in Burarra language (available here) and started putting an e-book together using ibook author. Unfortunately the sound recording wasn’t very good, so we couldn’t complete that one, but it was fun learning how to use iBooks Author to combine images, text and recordings.

 

Margaret Duncan

On Sunday we had Margaret Duncan from Urapunga read a fish story in Kriol language (available here). This one we managed to complete – you can download the final version for your iOS device here.

We also created a DAAF handout explaining how we did each part of the process – you can use it to create your own digital story for the #LAALComp.

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Link

A few e-books have been made with the agreement and help of language and story owners. These will be uploaded alongside the original stories for others to enjoy. One of these will an e-book about making dillybags (bathi) from strips of pandanus. This story was written, illustrated, translated and read aloud by Elizabeth Milmilany Dhurrkay (Räkay).

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Räkay has now been working with Dr Brian Devlin to produce a version which can be read using a web browser, mobile phone, tablet or computer. (To see an early draft please go to bathi.netii.net). This has been very much a team effort. Cathy Bow segmented the sound files. Brian prepared an HTML5 template to integrate the audio, text and images.

A colour coding scheme was developed at Milingimbi to indicate the reading levels of printed books produced for use in the bilingual program. One interesting question is whether the ebooks that go into the LAAL archive should also use the same scheme.

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