Legal Innovation in Papua New Guinea, 1970-2015

Data collection of field notes relating to resolving conflicts in village and peri-urban Papua New Guinea contexts of the Village Court system. These are extremely sensitive in nature, as they contain much confidential and personal background relating to the participants in Village Court cases. We plan to make a version of this available in a database under active development, which will be heavily redacted and anonymised, but which we still think will be of value once complete, probably some time in 2017 or early 2018. Segments of the notes are in one of the pidgin varieties, most are in English. The field notes are held by the original researchers, who are willing to discuss access with appropriate researchers. Eventually these will be deposited with embargoes of twenty years with the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University (HRAF). Fischer is currently engaged in a project based on the notes with HRAF to auto-create very detailed metadata from sensitive documents such as field notes that preserve anonymity and confidentiality while relating much more detail of what is being described in the notes, based initially on HRAF's Outline of Cultural Materials ontology as applied by the Analysts at HRAF to ethnographic material.