Reite Village Online Library
September 21, 2015 by Giles Lane · 4 Comments
This website has been created as an online library of TKRN notebooks made by the villagers of Reite and its neighbours in Papua New Guinea’s Madang Province. These books were created during a field trip in March 2015 and we hope to add many more in the future. We aim to transfer management of the site to the villagers themselves in due course, so that they can continue growing the library for future generations. As 4G mobile internet service penetrates into the jungle where they live and more local people own smartphones and connected devices, this is an increasingly likely possibility.
Mixing the physical and digital in this way means that traditional knowledge and customs may be preserved and transmitted forwards by embracing some of the changes that industrialisation and urbanisation bring to traditional rural communities. By working alongside the existing relationships of knowledge exchange it offers new opportunities for inter-generational collaboration on self-documentation of stories, experiences, history and practical knowledge of working with and sustaining the local ecology and environment.
The site itself is extremely simple and uses only free services: a free WordPress.com blog as the primary interface for organising and sharing the books; and a free Dropbox account as the primary repository of the PDF files of the scanned books. It is a key component in our TKRN Toolkit, and closes the loop in our use of hybrid digital and physical tools and techniques.
The villagers themselves developed their own categories and taxonomies for cataloguing the books, which have all been tagged accordingly. The books are thus searcheable by title, author and subject(s). Many of the books include an author photo on the cover page; a thumbnail image of the scanned book was included in each post, and a blog theme chosen that presents the main page as a mosaic of images from the posts. For communities with highly varied literacies, it also enables visual recognition both of the author’s faces, and in many cases their handwriting or drawing style.
TKRN Blank Notebooks
September 17, 2015 by Giles Lane · 4 Comments
These notebooks have been co-designed with villagers of Reite in Madang Province, Papua New Guinea by Giles Lane and James Leach as part of the TK Reite Notebooks project and Toolkit. They can be downloaded, printed out and made up into physical notebooks for recording traditional knowledge. Then they can be scanned and shared online or as physical objects.
The books have been created using bookleteer – Proboscis’ free self-publishing platform. Each link is to an A4 PDF file. The “view options” links open each notebook’s page in bookleteer with US Letter PDF and a web readable version.
16 page Standard Notebook with Questions – Tok Pisin • view options
16 page Standard Notebook with Questions – English • view options
16 page Teaching & Learning Notebook with Questions – Tok Pisin • view options
20 page Multi-stage Processes Notebook with Questions – Tok Pisin • view options
16 page Story Notebook with Questions – Tok Pisin • view options
12 page Initiation Notebook with Questions – Tok Pisin • view options
16 page General Purpose Notebook (No Questions) – Tok Pisin • view options
16 page Structured Notebook with Question – Bilingual Tok Pisin/English • view options
View the TKRN Notebooks collection on bookleteer.
We also have created this guide to folding and making up the notebooks (in English/Tok Pisin) :
