3,000 typists sought to digitize Hawaiian newspapers

Thousands of volunteer typists are invited to help transcribe 60,000 digitally scanned pages through the Ike Kuokoa initiative to make Hawaiian-language newspapers searchable online. The effort was launched on Nov. 28 at Honolulu's Iolani Palace with about 200 volunteers.

Volunteer typists are necessary after funding for a Bishop Museum project ran out and because no computer software program is precise enough to handle the Hawaiian language, according to Kaui Sai-Dudoit, outreach program manager. The museum project took Hawaiian-language newspapers that were sitting in archives and made them digital. However, text files are needed so that they can be searched online. Sai-Dudoit says it would take about $2.1 million to do that without volunteers.

The Hawaiian alphabet has eight consonants and five vowels in words of native origin. The consonants are H, K, L, M, N, P, W, plus the okina, or glottal stop. The five vowels are: A, E, I, O and U. "One letter off and it's a totally different word," Sai-Dudoit said. "With no money, no funding and nothing but our desire, we thought, let's ask Hawaii to help us," she said.

The 1,300 volunteers who signed up as of Monday are also from beyond the islands — from Japan to Holland to all over the U.S. mainland. Volunteers can sign up at http://www.awaiaulu.org to be assigned a page to type. Knowledge of Hawaiian language is not necessary. Volunteers then upload the typed file, which will be reviewed by a native Hawaiian speaker for accuracy.

It will take a volunteer about three hours to type a page, which has about 2,220 words. About 3,000 volunteers are needed to complete the project by its July 31 target deadline, a date that coincides with Hawaiian Restoration Day, commemorating the end of the Hawaiian Kingdom's brief occupation by Great Britain. Monday's launch event took place during Hawaiian Independence Day, which marks the day Great Britain and France recognized Hawaii's independence.

More than 125,000 pages of Hawaiian-language news were printed in more than a hundred different papers from 1834 to 1948, chronicling Hawaii as the islands went from kingdom to constitutional monarchy to republic and territory. The goal is to make the pages available by next year at http://www.nupepa.org , which is the Hawaiian word for "newspaper," and http://www.papakilodatabase.com , a database built by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.