AustLit

'I am pleased to offer this paper in tribute to Luise Hercus who has always been quick to adopt new approaches to working with older sources on Australia’s Indigenous languages (see also Nathan, this volume). In that spirit, I offer an example of using a novel method of working with a large set of material created by Daisy Bates (1859-1951) in the early 1900s. The masses of papers she produced over her lifetime have been an ongoing source of information for Aboriginal people and for researchers (e.g. White 1985; McGregor 2012; Bindon & Chadwick 1992). The collection at the National Library of Australia (NLA) takes up 51 boxes and 8.16m of shelf space and contains a range of material, but here I will focus on the vocabularies of Australian languages. Bates sent out a questionnaire in 1904 that was filled in by various people by hand, creating a set of manuscript pages. She then supervised the typing of these manuscripts. Over the past two years I have been working with the NLA to make digital images of some 23,000 pages of these vocabulary manuscripts, and to create digital text versions of the 4,368 typescripts, which can then be linked back to the page images of both the typescripts and handwritten questionnaire manuscripts.' (Introduction)