For Kau‘i Sai-Dudoit, it started as just another job. But as she dug further into her work digitizing Hawaiian language newspapers, the oldest dating back to 1834, it became something else. “It’s now become my passion,” Sai-Dudoit, project manager of
For Kau‘i Sai-Dudoit, it started as just another job. But as she dug further into her work digitizing Hawaiian language newspapers, the oldest dating back to 1834, it became something else.
“It’s now become my passion,” Sai-Dudoit, project manager of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, said yesterday.
The Kaua‘i Museum in Lihu‘e is currently housing the “Ho‘olaupa‘i: The Hawaiian Language Newspaper Project,” an effort to showcase how Hawaiians went from having no written language to being one of the most literate populations in the world. Between 1834 and 1948, more than 70 Hawaiian-language newspapers were printed.
Many of these newspapers, which have been collecting dust in the archives of the Bishop Museum, are difficult to study and primarily known only to scholars. The Ho‘olaupa‘i project aims to make these documents more accessible to the public electronically by using Optical Character Recognition software.
“It’s a great breakthrough,” Puakea Nogelmeier, an advising scholar on the project, said. “This opens the door to this whole archive.”
Nogelmeier feels a new perspective of Hawaiian history will be discovered, since most historians couldn’t interpret the newspapers and most Hawaiian history was written by non-Hawaiians.
“(This project will) give a three-dimensional quality to the history and culture that has been two-dimensional in a lot of ways,” Nogelmeier said.
Since 2002, Ho‘olaupa‘i has added more than 9,000 pages of Hawaiian language newspapers to the Web site; more than 100,000 pages remain to be added.
Sai-Dudoit pointed out that newspapers on Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau provided detailed accounts from residents. A series written by Moke Manu described his travels throughout Kaua‘i, which took place over the span of two months.
Another article was written by Dema Pua of Ni‘ihau describes a large electrical storm. As he was writing the story, a meteorite fell to the earth. “Upland of Kamalino, is a small field of sweet potatoes. There is a hole there, very deep, and all the way below, you can see part of a rock, red like iron, one side of it melted, like tin,” Pua wrote.
Sai-Dudoit feels this process is important because most people don’t even know the newspapers exist. She also believes it is important for “children to understand (that) Hawaiians kept the culture.
“It’s the purest form of culture and history,” she said. “(It’s) a perspective not included in history books.”
The Hawaiian language newspaper articles are available at www.nupepa.org. The exhibit will be at the Kaua‘i Museum in the Senda Gallery until May 30.
• Rachel Gehrlein, staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 225) or rgehrlein@kauaipubco.com
