The Cambridge Experimental Videodisc Project
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Description
The Naga Videodisc was created in the late 1980s at Cambridge University under the direction of Professor Alan Macfarlane. It was a multimedia resource, including most of the known ethnographic material about the Naga ethnic groups living in the Assam and Arunachal Pradesh districts of India and parts of Burma. Approximately 30 minutes of moving film, some sound, seven thousand black and white photographs, 1200 photographs of artefacts were made available. There were also over six thousand pages of text from published works and unpublished diaries, fieldnotes, tour diaries and other materials. The entire system was searchable through a powerful probabilistic system and was linked to a book (by Julian Jacobs, with Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison and Anita Herle entitled The Nagas) and museum exhibition. The visual and sound materials were held on a videodisc, the rest on a computer.
Videodisc technology did not take off in the west, and the materials became unavailable. The entire contents of the Naga Videodisc has now been transformed into a collection of web pages at http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/nagas/coll/4/xintroduction/detail/all/index.html