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| Puakea Nogelmeier’s new book tells the story of making Hawaiian language newspapers accessible to the general public. |
Over 125,000 pages from 100 different Hawaiian-language newspapers
were printed from 1834 to 1948. They equal a million or more typescript pages
of text - the largest native-language cache in the western world - a repository
of knowledge, opinion and historical progress as Hawai‘i moved through kingdom,
constitutional monarchy, republic and territory. Only 2% of that repository has
been integrated into English to open up this resource for general access.
‘Ike Ku‘oko‘a — Liberating Knowledge is a Hawaiian-newspaper
initiative overseen by Puakea Nogelmeier, Director of Awaiaulu, and Kau‘i
Sai-Dudoit, Project Director of ‘Ike Ku‘oko‘a, and utilizing an army of
volunteers, that is taking the remaining 60,000 digital scans of
Hawaiian-language newspapers and transcribing them into searchable typescript. It
will open up hundreds of thousands of pages worth of data on history, culture,
politics, sciences, world view, and more.
In 8 months since its inception, 15,500 pages of newspapers were
transcripted by 3000 ‘Ike Ku‘oko‘a Project volunteers from over 8 countries. For
information on the background of the Hawaiian Newspaper Initiatives, the book Mai
Pa'a I Ka Leo: Historical Voice in Hawaiian Primary Materials is available from
Bishop Museum Press by book, Kindle, and Nook.
For more information http://www.awaiaulu.org/main/ index.php
