Instructional Communications Systems works with the Smithsonian Institution to preserve Jamaican linguistic heritage
Back in the early 1950s, Frederic Cassidy lugged a 40-pound tape recorder and 25-pound converter with the car batteries to power it through 52 communities across Jamaica to capture the voices of schoolchildren, fishermen, sugar-cane field workers and elder statesmen.
Smithsonian Institution enlists ICS expertise
The 15 tapes that comprised Cassidy's pioneering work in Jamaican linguistics remained at the offices of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) on the UW-Madison campus after Cassidy's death in 2000 until they were acquired this year by the Smithsonian Museum Support Center (SMSC) for the National Anthropological Archives. The Smithsonian called upon the expertise of UW-Extension's Instructional Communications Systems (ICS) to help preserve the voices recorded on Cassidy's aging reel-to-reel tapes.
Jake Homiak, director of the Anthropology Collections and Archives Program for SMSC, explains the significance of the tapes: "Cassidy's recordings of Jamaican speech may be some of the earliest done—certainly some of the earliest sound recordings that were collected at so many different sites around the island."
ICS helps to preserve Frederic Cassidy's research
The late Cassidy, a professor of English at UW-Madison from 1939 until his retirement in 1978, is best known for the 37 years he devoted to working on DARE, a mammoth project of five volumes to be completed in 2010. But the Jamaica-born Cassidy's passion for linguistics and regional language was broader than American English. In 1961 Cassidy wrote Jamaica Talk, and in 1967 he co-wrote the Dictionary of Jamaican English with Robert B. LePage.
Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of DARE, assisted SMSC with the logistics involved in generating and shipping reference copies of the original tapes. During this process, Hall suggested that the archiving and copies for the Cassidy family, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, DARE and Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives could be done at ICS. The Smithsonian assented, and this summer Kevin Adamzak, digital media specialist for ICS's digital media and Web development team, carefully digitized the half-century-old recordings and then burned them to archival grade CDs that have a 300-year lifetime.
Smithsonian makes research available to scholars
The newly digitized Fredric G. Cassidy Collection will be available to scholars through the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives.
Helping to save a heritage
The Smithsonian's Homiak says, "Potential researchers who use this collection will have an ability to compare what Dr. Cassidy collected around the mid-20th century in Jamaica to recordings from the early 1980s to the present."
Marcia Baird, ICS director, says, "Instructional Communications Systems is honored to have been able to use its technical skills and tape preservation experience to help ensure future access to Frederic Cassidy's recordings of the linguistic culture of Jamaica."
For more information:
www.uwex.edu/ics/dmwd
ICS Digital Media Services
(608) 265-6178
By Christina Rencontre, intern, Instructional Communications Systems, Broadcasting and Media Innovations, UW-Extension/graduate student, UW-Madison
The technical expertise of the ICS staff helped to preserve some of the groundbreaking linguistic work done by UW-Madison Professor Frederic G. Cassidy (1907-2000).
Photo courtesy of the Dictionary of American Regional English
