 That's it. Okay. Just leave it there. That's great. All right. Well, sorry for that rather disjointed beginning, but look, I'm Sonya Pivak and I am here today to talk about the, well, it's not a niche version of Minecraft that's creating a virtual AMP for the deaf community. It's basically signed DNA, which is the Sign Language Deaf National Archive. It's a project we've been working on at Deaf Radio for the last 18 months. So I'm going to give you just a quick tour through some of the achievements, frustrations, barriers, and dreams we've had over that period of time. So as I say, Sign Language Deaf National Archive signed DNA, we thought was the perfect name because Sign Language is in the blood of deaf people. So we felt like it was a good use of an acronym. Before I go any further, let me just explain what Deaf Radio is and who we are. So Deaf Radio is a sign language hub basically and we take on projects or services, anything that relates to sign language or deaf people. So we dream in sign language and think about sign language pretty much all the time. And this is one of our services that we've developed about 18 months ago called C-Flow, which was an online translation service which enabled deaf people to access government information in particular in sign language but also personal correspondence as well. We've been involved in developing the Sign Language curriculum for schools year seven and eight. And on the side of some commercial projects, we've been doing Sign DNA as a non-profit project with another charity group. So I'll explain a little bit more about that one. Before I do, let me give you some other context. I'm a Deaf person, you've probably realized that already. I was born into a deaf family, so my sister is deaf, my parents are deaf, my extended family has many deaf people in it as well. So I grew up already with quite a strong deaf cultural identity. Because deaf people do have their own culture, language, values, ways of seeing the world, stories, history. And I was fortunate enough to have that in abundance when I was growing up. But that's not the norm for deaf people, typically. And globally, only 5% of deaf people have another deaf person in their family. So 95% of deaf people are the only deaf person in their family. And so they don't necessarily have access to the culture or the values of deaf people as they're growing up. They may be schooled in a different way or be raised as a hearing person with other technology, hearing aids, speech therapy, things like that. So they often come back into the deaf community sometimes when they're teenagers or early adults. And so it's important that the community has structures and mechanisms to help those people acculturate back into the deaf community. Deaf community is a culture with no land, obviously. No, there's no deaf island or deaf continent, although deaf people are everywhere. But there are some deaf properties and they are very highly valued in the deaf community. So here's some images of deaf clubs throughout New Zealand. Strangely, New Zealand's deaf clubs are still quite strong. Overseas, we're looking at other countries mainly closing down all of the deaf clubs as youth prefer not to go to places where older people drink and tell stories. They tend to want to congregate in other places. So there was some research in Australia recently that compared a group of elderly deaf people and a group of deaf youths and gave them a map of Sydney, a physical map, and asked each group to put a pin on physical locations that they felt any attachment to. And a lot of older deaf people thought, wow, it'll be there and there. It'll be where the deaf school was, where the deaf club is, where we had that sports tournament 20 years ago. So they covered the map in pins. But the youth group didn't have any physical attachments to anywhere in Sydney. It's certainly not in the same magnitude as the elderly community. So their sense of value in play seems to have changed quite dramatically. One of our taonga is sign language, of course. It's a unique native language to New Zealand and it's quite different to English. It's a 3D moving language that requires gesture and movement so it doesn't have a written form. So the only way of recording or presenting sign language is on videotape. Obviously it's perfectly suited to that. So our aim is to collect a lot of the video material that has been shot over the decades that includes deaf people or sign language so that we can position them in one place for easy access, whether that's for education or personal interest or research or a culturation of deaf people. As I said before, most deaf people have hearing families. So many of the tapes that they may have taken of the deaf community at that time are being lost because hearing families are not aware of the cultural significance of those tapes and when that person passes away, often those tapes are destroyed. There are also materials in institutions and we're trying to access those as well. So the deaf radio team sort of decided on building an archive as a good concept but we wanted to check with the elders of the community first to see if they were interested to support it where they thought it was a good idea and they were fully behind it. This is Owen Gibbons who's a well-known deaf man in the deaf community, has been there for decades, has a passion for dancing on tables but don't ask me why but that's just what he likes to do. But he was also one of the, he was the first person to give us his box of old 8mm films that he had taken and here they are. So that was huge for us because at that time we were still just asking around to see if it was a good idea or not and here was this box of films from the 50s and 60s. We know that Owen was central to the deaf community in Auckland for many years. We knew how valuable they would be. So we quickly said to him, yep, that's fine, fantastic. We can't wait to get these digitised and we'll give you a copy and you can see some of these films including the wedding to his late wife. Unfortunately we sent them to various commercial operations to get digitised and none of them could do it because the state of the film was in such deterioration they weren't able to do it. And that became very disappointing because we would send them to different places around New Zealand and Australia and the answer was always the same, that they couldn't be retrieved. We even contacted Weta in Wellington to beg for their assistance but they couldn't help in this particular instance. So we were fortunate enough at this time to be in contact with the New Zealand film archive in Wellington and presented this problem to them and we flew down with the box and met with them, with the coffee obviously as well. And they could see the state that they were in, they couldn't make any promises but over the next few months they had spent a lot of free time and effort in digitising what they could. Apparently a lot of the films were sort of dissolving as they went through the machine and even some of the older films they were just taking still shots of whenever they could. So that was a huge boost in the arm for us in terms of our motivation. So beginning this group obviously we needed to apply for funding. We're a company so that becomes very difficult. We decided to set up this group under an umbrella organisation called Diversity Works Trust who can apply for funding on our behalf and help us oversee the project. But we wanted to make sure that the archive itself was owned by the deaf community, not by us or not by another trust. So we asked the communities around New Zealand to nominate people that they thought would be good custodians of this archive and these are the people that were selected. So the concept started to get some momentum. We had a group set up under the trust, we had an advisory group and so we needed to now let people know that they could start to contribute their films to this archive. So it was a barrage of cards and contact and emails and meetings and presentations and Twitter and social media. And it worked. We started to receive a lot of material from the deaf community. So far we've received almost 600 separate films and videos. Some are on DVDs, some have already been digitised. We're only accepting material up to 1990 because we think that's the most critical period. There's the higher risk of the substrates deteriorating. The oldest we've received so far is 1951. The woman on the left there is Annette Scotch. She's the president of the Manawatu Deaf Society. She was thrilled because she'd been the custodian of this box of local films and videos as had the previous presidents before her waiting for this kind of project to come along and not knowing what to do with it in the meantime. So we obviously acknowledge where these recordings come from and we give back a digital recording to the people that have contributed to films and obviously they get the original back as well if they want to. So we now had all these films and no money to do anything with it. So that was good in one sense but a bit frustrating in another. We still needed some funds to move ahead with the project. So we thought about Sausage Scissor at MITRE 10 but we realized that would take decades. So we decided to go with Pledge Me which was just sort of starting up at that time and we decided to make the amount that we required $10,000 which was generally pretty silly people thought. And I think some of you have probably received a number of emails and requests for donations and many of you did donate to this project we know. And over that two month period on the last day we finally got over that 10,000 barriers, 10,415 while the time it closed which was fantastic for us because even Pledge Me themselves said, look requests of that amount only 5% are successful. So we were really sort of humbled by that level of support from the community. It's still a lot of work to sort of prompt people and organize that. It's probably a couple hundred hours work but it was still well worth it. So I mentioned a few successes so far but it hasn't been plain sailing. As I said to you before some videos are owned by private individuals and they have been willing to contribute them but still some are held by institutions and that's been more difficult to negotiate. The deaf schools in New Zealand have hundreds of videos of events that they've recorded over the years but are still reluctant to allow an outside group to work with them. So it's still a work in progress. We've also had some issues with TVNZ who have filmed a lot of deaf events and deaf people in the past few decades and we've asked them to donate their material as well because we are a non-profit project and this is a native language and TVNZ are supposedly working with the government. So we've done our best to try and convince them of the merits of this project and that they should donate these three but the original quotes were extremely expensive but fortunately the Ministry of Culture and Heritage has been working with them on this topic and others and they've reduced the licensing fees. So there's still some cost in terms of getting access to them but the cost is greatly reduced which is fantastic. I think when we started the project we had no idea on how much work was involved or how big the archive would be. We haven't been involved in this kind of thing before and as we began to add more features to what we wanted in terms of the archive the costs generally ballooned. So fortunately what we lacked in financial power we had in people power. So people from the deaf community were coming in and volunteering their time to help with processing the videos in terms of what the video content was, adding time markers so we knew where certain segments began and ended and what those different topics were. So this is a typical sheet that we would use to process one of the videos. So again all these have been filled in by volunteers now for hundreds of videos but to do this amount of work on 600 videos is turning me grey already. So that's the same thing just from a larger perspective. We've also been trying to engage with the community as much as we can because sometimes we see videos or contents of videos and we don't know who they are or what the events are. So we've put requests out through social media to try and get some assistance from the community in terms of identifying people and events. $20,000 that's what we thought it would cost on the side of the project. That's what we knew it would be an online archive. It would be free to access. It would be accessible by youth and older members of the community. So we thought we sort of budgeted it out. We thought 20s sounded quite realistic. I'm not sure if it sounds realistic to you. You might be laughing already. But obviously as things grew and we added more sort of deaf specific features to the archive those costs really did start to more than triple. So to be honest we were hoping to be able to show you, it's almost like a preview of the completed site by now when we put in this paper request months ago but for various different reasons and financial reasons are one of the significant ones, the finishing of the archive has been put off till about March of next year. I'm not going to go through looking at the archive and what it does. You can do that when it's released and you know a lot about what archives are already. I might just pick out before I finish one or two aspects of the archive that are quite unique to the deaf people. We're also thinking that this will create some kind of platform for younger deaf people to work with older deaf people to create that kind of to sort of bridge that divide through creating this virtual land. So we've set up a few features that we think might help with this. This is not actually what the final website looks like. This is just a draft for just to show you can give you an idea. But let's say the video in this instance was the sign singers on the top left hand corner. In this case you know Catherine may have heard of this event or have you know deaf people are great storytellers so they will have heard about stories including these sign singers. So this allows people to present or comments back to the archive or add their stories or add their memories as Helen was saying into the signed DNA archive and hopefully that'll take on a life of its own so that the original item just becomes a stimulus for drawing experiences and memories out of the community. People can also type their comments in English if they want to. It's a bilingual website but in this case they can also film their responses directly in NZSL directly into the website. They don't have to record it on a separate program and then upload it. They can just record it straight into the website. It's all done through Node.js so it's reasonably robust. We'll also have a feature to again try and elicit more participation and ownership from the deaf community. So this is a feature where deaf people are able to name who is present in certain videos. You might also be familiar with this kind of concept in Facebook where you can tag videos that's sorry tag photographs with developing a feature where you can tag videos so that deaf people can register as a friend of the archive and go in and contribute their knowledge, contribute their stories or their videos even to the archive. So there's a few little features like that that we're developing to help the community use it and take more ownership of this historical archive. And just finally a word about sustainability. Obviously we don't want to set up a project to last a year and then have to close down because we don't have any funds. Money does talk obviously. So at the moment we're focusing on videos up until the 1990s but obviously there's a lot more that could be included in the archive but as I say money is one of the biggest issues. We've got now over 600 videos. We're expected to go over a thousand before too long. These videos are accessible via websites and smart devices so they have to be uploaded in WebM and MP4. So there's a huge amount of memory that needs to be stored. The cost of that is quite prohibitive because it's video of course rather than text documents or images. So we've been informed that's about six what we have at the moment is about six hundred dollars worth of memory per month to host. So that's that's quite a lot for a small archive to have to cope with just in terms of hosting and storage. So we're trying to think of other ways to go forward. We have set up an official trust now of our own rather than working underneath another trust. So we will be applying for funds to cover the ongoing costs. We're also thinking of licensing signed DNA so that deaf communities in other countries can use the same template to do the same kind of archiving of their video histories and their sign language histories and also means that any improvements we make can then be leveraged to other countries. So some of that will help cover those ongoing costs because we do want to try and make it sustainable obviously. And that's my talk. Some of you may recognize this font by the way might have triggered some some connections for you or recollections. It is a font based on the paintings of Colin McCann which obviously is a New Zealand painter. And we thought that was great for our archive because it is a New Zealand archive. It's kind of you know it's homemade contributions. We didn't want anything to look too technical. So we begged the designer of the font to allow us to use it. So we've just got permission to do that. But we also want to ask for your help if you have any ideas on how we can make this possible or programs you know of or people that we can contact with much we'd love to hear from you. So please do come forward. Thank you very much.