Summary:
Nov 14th 2016: To create a detailed and comprehensive record of the Konkani culture and preserve it digitally and in archives in institutions all over the world. The situation:
This is the beginning of the end.
- Lack of motivation among parents to teach their children the Konkani language and history has lead to a stage where there are not enough people to take Konkani culture to the next generation.
- As families migrate to other parts of the world, English is adopted as the first language and less contact with Konkani people. Therefore, Konkani is eventually forgotten…
- Also smaller families & inter-cultural marriages means no future base for Konkani culture and the language to grow and evolve for the modern times.
- This is the last generation to speak, write and understand the Konkani language.
This is in the natural evolution of humans. With a painful heart we have to accept this. For thousands of years, many cultures, languages and traditions have become extinct or merged with other cultures due to conquest, demographics, migration and various other reasons.
Aim
The only thing we can now do is to gather all aspects of the culture, archive and preserve it for future generations of humans. This is our responsibility.
We have a lot to do and time is short. All the elders with the knowledge of the history and culture are leaving us without leaving behind a record of their memories.
A hundred years from now, when people come across the word Konkani, let there be a detailed record of our language, traditions and cultural aspects. This will be our legacy.
Contribute:
This is a long term project. We live in an age where attention span is ever decreasing. We welcome any person, groups willing to contribute.
People with academic knowledge of Konkani language, educators, translators, culture and history. Konkani speakers, authors, writers, musicians, orators, comedians, film makers, artists.
People with expertise in library science, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, history, geography, psychology, geneology, Unicode implementation in computer systems and databases, professional and academic journal and book editing and publishing, web designers and programmers.
Volunteers with interest. Please spread the word. email: web /at/ konkaniculture.org
Plan:
Forms teams of common expertise and start the process of data, information collection. Reach out to people & institutions who are doing similar work and seek their collaboration.
Archives to be of paper form, digital form, various forms of multimedia i.e. photos, videos, audio. Storage of cultural material in academic institutions, museums and website for universal access.
Updates: Project Structure Proposal
Mon, Sept 11th 2017: Added list of advanced image, audio recognition projects to proposed structure document to supplement main goals.
Thu, July 13th 2017: Moving website source code to github
Wed, July 12th 2017: Changing software to blogdown() R and RStudio environment.
Tue, Dec 13th 2016: Created [Proposed Structure]. Online web database, aspects of culture2 - new sections
Sat, Dec 3rd 2016: Skeleton of information structure created in [Proposed Structure]. This will be updated periodically. Tackling one sub-culture at a time. Also independently creating online repository database for viewers and a comprehensive data entry facility for contributors.
Thu, Nov 17th 2016: Creating team and project structure. Since Konkani has many sub-cultures, creation of teams to lead and document each sub-culture.