Mitchell and Delbridge project

The Mitchell and Delbridge tapes 1998 re-issue.

A.G. Mitchell and Arthur Delbridge were both staff in the English Department of The University of Sydney. At the beginning of the project, Alex Mitchell was the McCaughey Professor of Early English Literature and Language. Soon after the commencement of the project, he became the Deputy Vice Chancellor of The University of Sydney. Arthur Delbridge was also a Lecturer in the Department of English and had at one time been a student of Mitchell. Both men had a major interest in Australian Speech and this study of theirs was very important for a number of reasons. This was the first large socio-linguistic study undertaken in the world, and was the inspiration for William Labov to undertake a similar study in the USA. The study also made use of taped recordings of speech - it did not rely exclusively on the ear of one researcher thus ensuring a greater degree of stability in the analysis. It made use of the then relatively new process of spectrographic analysis in analysing vowel data. It made use of the power of computer based statistical analysis- the analysis of the data was performed by SILLIAC - one of the world's first major stored program computers.

The material gathered by Mitchell & Delbridge was stored on reel-to-reel tapes, and the historical records supplied by the teachers was stored in paper form.

Pro Vice Chancellor's Office, and APPEN Speech Technology made funds available for a project to preserve and re-issue the tapes.