乡音苑 Phonemica

10/06/2017

Be sure to check out our friends at Bivouac Recording, creator of the excellent book/recordings Growing Up with Shanghai. They're now on 喜马拉雅FM. Definitely worth a listen!

Bivouac_Recording的专辑【与沪成长】,【与沪成长】全集在线收听,打包下载【与沪成长】.喜马拉雅,听我想听.

15/02/2017

I'm happy to announce that our first mobile app is now available. This is part of a larger series of mobile apps to help under-served languages.

It's a Singpo (景颇) dictionary published in cooperation with the Singpho Language & Cultural Development Society of Northeast India. This is the first version of the first app, with many more to come in the future.

You can download the apk to try it out at http://phonemica.net/apps/singpho.apk. We'll move to the Google Play store and include an iOS version in April, when we have more time to do such things.

03/02/2017

In less than 2 weeks we're going to be announcing some new projects, the first of which has recently been completed. We're excited with these new developments and hope others find them useful as well. Stay tuned.

19/01/2017

Last night I was happy to meet with some Jingpaw scholars from Yunnan who are working with the communities in Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. I look forward to their future good work on the languages.

10/12/2016

We've been taking care of some server maintenance this week. Hopefully you'll notice slightly faster load times. We sure are.

More to come soon, plus an announcement about a side-project we've been working on to help with minority language documentation.

16/11/2016

Today I'm proud to announce that, after 5 years, Phonemica has received formal financial backing. We'll post more details on this shortly, once all the paperwork is complete, but in the mean time I can at least share that for the next two years, all of our hosting costs will be covered. This is great news as we've been paying out of pocket from the very start of the project.

Support of this kind will help us continue to develop the site, making it easier to use and more useful for both the story tellers and listeners, as well as for academics working to help preserve the rich diversity of the world's languages.

We are also working with researchers in the Southwest China / India / Myanmar border region in order to document and promote minority languages, many of which have never before been studied or documented. More on that soon.

27/03/2016

This week's progress report: We've fixed missing labels in the user menu when using the Chinese or Korean version of the site's user interface. Other than that, more work on the Android app, which is coming along well. I'm passing a copy on to 司圓直 later this week for help testing some of the basics.

19/03/2016

In this week's progress report, more small fixes to the site and a lot of time spent on mobile development (photos of that coming next week when things are looking prettier).

Weekend Update #2 Posted by Yhilan on March 20 2016 7:57 am 2016年3月20日 It’s still early on Sunday and I’ll keep working on things as the day progresses, but there’s already been some good progress, so I’m writing this up now in order to get back to work. Fixed More of the same. Some small changes to…

13/03/2016

New blog post

Introducing weekly progress reports Posted by Yhilan on March 13 2016 9:55 am I’ve just returned from 6 months of fieldwork. During that time I didn’t have internet access, so I wasn’t able to do anything to take care of the site. I’m back now, and starting today I’m instituting a weekly development…

28/08/2015

Hello everyone. Some of you have noticed that the server was down this week. We ended up needing to upgrade in order to increase our storage capacity, and this upgrade then required us to make some other changes regarding the physical server which the site is stored on. Unfortunately, there were some complications with this process which resulted in the server being down. We've been working all week to try to remedy the issue. Fortunately, as of a couple hours ago it is now working again.

We apologise for the down time. We only expected it to be down fo 15 minutes, not 7 days.

Thank you for your continued interest and support!

07/07/2015

http://phonemica.net/blog/2015/07/fixing-broken-audio/

Fixing broken audio Posted by Yhilan on July 7 2015 4:15 am Last year when we changed hosts, some of the audio files on the site became corrupted. For most if not all, I have uncorrupted backups. The problem is really just finding the recordings for which the audio was cut short. This is one such re…

03/07/2015

Hey guess what. We've updated the site. You can now once again search the map and search entries for keywords.

http://phonemica.net

More updates coming soon, including better interoperability between Phonemica and software like ELAN and FLEx. We've also been working on some cooperation with academic institutions. We're working to make some of the field recordings that were originally gathered for academic purposes public on the site. Expect to see a lot more Tibetoburman recordings going up on the site in the coming months.

28/06/2015

We're still here! I promise!

We were in a huge rush in December to get things more automated, since we knew we would have to take a few months away this spring take care of some other unrelated things. But we're back.

We've spent the weekend reworking some of the site's core infrastructure to prepare for an upcoming upgrade. There's probably another week of work to do to get that done, but then expect to see a significant site update roll out about another week after that.

If there's anyone looking to help out with a few small tasks on the site, please send a message and we can chat. There are a few minor data correction tasks that we'd love help on.

Also, we're asking people to share their favourite stories from the site. If there's a story you are especially appreciative of, let us know! We'll be collecting a list our favourite posts so far.

Stay tuned!

01/11/2014

"Danwei has been publishing the Model Worker awards – our list of the best websites, blogs, Twitter feeds and podcasts on China since 2005 (there are links to the earlier awards at the bottom of this post). This year, we’ve decided to award the Model Worker award for the best China website to one that does not publish news or commentary on current affairs at all but focuses on the intangible cultural heritage of Chinese accents, dialects, and languages."

Danwei has been publishing the Model Worker awards - our list of the best websites, blogs, Twitter feeds and podcasts on China since 2005 (there are links to the earlier awards at the bottom of this post). This year, we've decided to award the Model Worker award for the best China website one that d…

17/10/2014

We've re-coded the entire site. THE ENTIRE SITE. Now you can:
- edit more of the speaker's information
- upload multiple recordings per speaker
- specify the recording language when it's different from the speaker's native language
- upload photos of the storyteller directly to the site
- upload a wider range of audio formats to the site, AND
- have them up on the site immediately. no more waiting for us to process each of your submissions by hand, which until this week we had needed to do.

Other semi-invisible changes:
- we changed hosting companies, which gives us more control over our server, which gives us the ability for even greater improvements to come
- we moved our server out of Singapore and to Tokyo instead, meaning much faster browsing for users in China.
- we changed our database system completely. this means the site won't crash when some big news story breaks.
- overall optimisation of the server-side code, so everything should just be faster anyway, even without all the other changes.

These changes are on top of the recent change in the transcription system. We have more improvements coming this weekend, including the ability to transfer a story from one storyteller to another in case you make a mistake when uploading, as well as the ability to submitted delete stories off the site.

09/10/2014

We're in the middle of changing hosting companies in order to provide a better experience to our users. Soon you'll no longer need to wait for your submission to be processed before you can transcribe. We're also offering a number of other major improvements. Stay tuned for the update, coming in the next week.

02/10/2014

Pardon the site crashes today! We had a huge burst of activity which unfortunately was more than our servers could handle. You'll see a few visual changes that were an attempt to relieve some of the stress on the servers. The map will be back to normal tomorrow once we're sure the traffic has quieted down a little bit.

Coincidentally, we've also been recoding some of the core structure this week to speed things up more generally, which will also help this sort of thing in the future.

10/09/2014

Support for rendering tone contours on top of waveform images is being added, coming later this week. Expect to start seeing greater data visibility on many of the recordings.