Potentials and Challenges in Oral Tradition Research and Education: Synchrotext Software

This short note introduces Synchrotext software, which was designed for representing African oral traditions and other kinds of performances and events. I began my documentation and analysis of Haya oral tradition in 1968. Synchrotext is the product of a decades-long project to adequately represent Haya oral traditions with an appropriate technology and an analytic frame that communicate the meaning and art in performance. Synchrotext provides a means of hearing the indigenous voices of oral tradition centered in their own time and inflected with their own intonation. For some time now, the computer has been employed to enhance research and education in the humanities. Internet sites like the Perseus Project demonstrate the powers of automated information-processing. To date, the computer's constantly evolving, massive, sophisticated storage-and-retrieval capabilities have been focused almost exclusively on the cultural heritage of written texts. And, although computer-assisted archives of recorded oral performances do exist, there remain current needs of oral traditions research that I believe can be more effectively met. In this short note, I would like to specify what those needs are and to introduce the software I have designed to speak to them. The needs to be discussed relate to five practices that are among those of current concern to students of oral traditions: representation of primary data, research and analysis, modes of collaboration, education, and the safeguarding of performance traditions: Each set of needs is discussed in turn, and each becomes a context for the description and evaluation of software design.