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Mapping endangered records of endangered cultures
or
We have harvesters but not enough fruit
Nick Thieberger
School of Languages and Linguistics
University of Melbourne
Charting Vanishing Voices:
A Collaborative Workshop to
Map Endangered Oral Cultures:
WOLP 2012 Workshop
Metrics (June 2012)274 collections of which 181 are publicly available8,268 items of which 7,637 are publicly available59,987 filesSize : 6.04 TBTime : 3,390 hours716 languages represented in the collection, from 65 countries
Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
Collaborative archiving project begun in 2002
Team made up of linguists and musicologists
Thee universities in a consortium (Sydney, Melbourne, ANU)
Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
Endangered records
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
Much of what is recorded is not being looked after properly
We can’t even find what has been recorded
How can we change that?
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
How much fieldwork is going on?• Newman (1992 and 2004) reports 34 US departments
running fieldmethods courses• LLL conference 2009 – 180 abstracts• 2nd International Conference Language Documentation
and Conservation 2011 – 230 abstracts
-
How much fieldwork is going on?• Assume at least 100 current fieldwork-based linguistic
projects • Since 1960, assuming 50 per year there should be
reasonable records of 2500 languages• Recordings, texts, dictionaries
– paper and digital (from the late 1980s onwards)
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
• Not even all funded projects are producing well-formed records– Well formed means described, archived and
accessible, e.g.,
ELDP – funded 2641 projects but ELAR has somewhere around 1102 deposits
1 http://www.hrelp.org/grants/projects/index.php?year=all
2 http://www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2012/04/elar-update-update
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
• More recording by non-linguists is necessary
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
• More recording by non-linguists is necessary
• New methods (e.g., Basic Oral Language Documentation - BOLD) that could include more recording by speakers
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
• More recording by non-linguists is necessary
• New methods (e.g., Basic Oral Language Documentation - BOLD) that could include more recording by speakers
• Social media as a source of recordings/texts/etc
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
• More recording by non-linguists is necessary
• New methods (e.g., Basic Oral Language Documentation - BOLD) that could include more recording by speakers
• Social media as a source of recordings/texts/etc
• How to ensure this kind of recording has longevity?
Too little is recorded in most of the world’s languages
There should be reasonable records of 2500 languages
• Where are they?
• How do we find them?
What is recorded is not being looked after properly
What is recorded is not being looked after properly
Digital recordings more fragile than analog, but most are not being archived
We can’t even find what has been recorded
Harvesting tools:
WorldCat http://www.oclc.org/worldcat
LLMap (Linguist List, USA) http://www.llmap.org
Multitree http://multitree.org
UNESCO Atlas http://www.unesco.org/culture/languages-atlas
ELCat / Endangered Language Cataloghttp://www.endangeredlanguages.com
Aggregated information
http://oralliterature.org/database, since mid-2010
We can’t even find what has been recorded
Language codes as a basis for searching- ISO-639-3, three-letter codes
Typically not used by most repositories (small regional libraries, State libraries, Film and Sound archives)
British Library
We can’t even find what has been recorded
National Library of Australia
We can’t even find what has been recorded
Vienna Phonogrammarchiv
We can’t even find what has been recorded
Online searching for language material
e.g., ‘Lewo’ as a language name?
Google – ‘Lewo’ – 3,080,000 hits
Google – ‘Lewo grammar’ – 2,200 hits
Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) – ‘Lewo’ 13 hits
OLAC search result
What else is out there?
• Items held in personal collections can’t be located
• speakers who recorded their families
• missionaries
• patrol officers
• These could be listed in catalogs, even if online access is restricted
Existing resources = low-hanging fruit
e.g., http://anglicanhistory.org/oceania/
Existing resources = low-hanging fruit
Problems of longevity of website-
based data sources
Existing resources = low-hanging fruit
Problems of longevity of website-
based data sources
Use the Internet Archive for a
persistent identifier
06/19/12
Endangered recordings
• Linguists need a shared infrastructure in which to locate their recordings
– to make them discoverable
– to provide standard descriptions which can be located by standard search mechanisms
– to enter metadata before it is forgotten
ExSite9
Metadata creation without (too many) tears
File browser – assigning attributes to files created in fieldwork
Application writes an XML file capturing relationships expressed by ‘drag and drop’ in the browser
XML file submitted to an archive’s catalog
From the laptop to the archive
06/19/12
ExSite9
From the laptop to the archive
06/19/12
ExSite9
From the laptop to the archive
06/19/12
06/19/12
In development in mid-2012
Cross-platform tool
Expected release later in 2012
ExSite9
EOPAS – Delivery of text and media
Encourage deposit of text and media
- Provide presentation formats for recorded texts
- Based on a linguist’s normal workflows
Record > Transcribe (Elan) > Interlinearise (Toolbox) >
XML output > EOPAS
http://linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/eopas/
Metadata
Playable media
http://www.eopas.org/transcripts/55
Selected text
Keyword in Context / Concordance in all texts of that language
http://www.eopas.org/transcripts/55
Ability to turn off
morphemic view
Ability to turn off
morphemic view
http://www.eopas.org/transcripts/55
Reference to
morpheme-level
Reference to
morpheme-level
http://www.eopas.org/transcripts/55
Reference to timed chunk
Reference to timed chunk
http://www.eopas.org/transcripts/55
Stories
Recorded by researchers
Strong source community interest in hearing recordings and reading texts
Stored in digital archives
Digitised from analog sources
Central harvesting by language code (ISO-639-3)
Stories in many of the world’s 7,000 languages
Persuade linguists to create research data properly and to deposit their materials in archives
- create incentives in academia to create collections
Locate existing digital material and incorporate it into principled online catalogs
Location of analog collections and their digitisation and incorporation into principled online catalogs
Building example texts/media for as many languages as possible
Harvesting tools need something to harvest!
http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/
