New Interface for Kaniʻāina “Voices of the Land”

We are pleased to share Kaniʻāina, the first Veridian audio collection.

Kaniʻāina, “Voices of the Land,” is digital library focusing on Native Hawaiian speech. It seeks to encourage and enhance the learning and use of Hawaiian through documentation and preservation.

Veridian engineers have just completed a refreshed user interface for this precious archive, which provides bilingual, interactive access to Native Hawaiian audio and transcripts.

 The Kaniʻāina interface - old vs new

There are currently two collections within Kaniʻāina. The Ka Leo Hawaiʻi (The Voice of Hawai’i) collection provides access to audio recordings of a public Hawaiian language radio program broadcast from 1972 to 1988.  Here you can listen to interviews of native Hawaiian speaking elders and phone calls from listeners.

The Kū i ka Mānaleo collection contains audio excerpts from the radio program Ka Leo Hawai’i and other sources, which are arranged into topics of interest.

These collections are able to be searched by title, word or name, providing opportunities for detailed research and learning.

All the recordings can be played and many have accompanying transcripts. When playing a recording with a transcript available, the transcription scrolls, highlighting the corresponding text automatically.

An audio recording with accompanying highlighted transcript

Veridian engineers upgraded Kaniʻāina to include the Bootstrap based interface which is more responsive, accessible, and functions better on small screen devices. The Kaniʻāina upgrade is now also visually richer and more representative of its purpose. 

Kaniʻāina grows out of a cross-campus collaboration between Hawaiian language scholars, language documentation scholars and digital library/archiving specialists at the University of Hawai‘i.

The Veridian team was honoured to be a part of this special project to help to revitalize and promote the indigenous language of Hawaiʻi.

Visit Kaniʻāina