Video and Language Documentation: panacea or

madness?

David Nathan

Endangered Languages ArchiveSchool of Oriental and African StudiesUniversity of Londonwww.hrelp.org

Introduction

There are a variety of costs of using and preserving video

And advantagesDo these align for language documentation and

its preservation?How do we measure value?

Costs and demands

Cost of equipment cameras time for selection etc associated equipment

tripodpowermics and cablescases etc

Power needs

Unstable technology

Cameras, carriers and formats all changing rapidlyconfusion of choiceincompatibilitiesmigration demandsobsolescence etc changing ideas of quality

Methodological issues

Intrusion (cf warnings from experienced fieldworkers) observer paradox distractions

to “subjects” to “operator” (who?)

No methodology! Detriment to audio

due to equipment due to split of attention

Detriment to images (videocam as stills substitute)

Computer equipment and processing

Availability Digitisation/capture, rendering Power Disk space and backup

up to ~ £50 a year to store a minute of video

Skills

Videography - amateur holiday videos?Editing

role and process of editing unclearskillsvideo verité and representationfor archiving

Annotation

Necessary for access - video opaque; need transcriptions or descriptive text to access and therefore use

Costs of annotationAdditional phenomena to be annotatedPrecisely because we are not cinematographers,

we need to exhibit/describe linguistic phenomena

Myth

Video as panacea, capturing ~everything? relationships, interpretations, contexts (time,

space, shared knowledge)

Costs and benefits

How are costs to be reflected?value of resourceshow measured?

demand (download, references, derivatives..)draw value addingeffectiveness

So far ...

A whole set of suboptimal compromises (or mistakes!)

Contradictions – or compromises

Video (compressed) formats - contradiction of “archive principles”if we compressed audio to the extent that we

compress video, then audio sizes are closer to text! (although video potentially compresses more than sound)

Contradictions

Compression - accept what we don’t accept elsewhere? Why?because quality principles don’t apply? orbecause video is just that special!(two extremes, of course)

Video is NOT specialbecause it doesn’t capture everything!because we don’t make it special (in terms of

cinematography, but we potentially could, eg annotation and suitable genre productions)

Community orientation

BUT there is a perspective that does make video special, in our context, and that is its community orientation

Community orientation

Communities like video productsCommunities can use products directlyCommunity can make video

but does it seem so because we take an amateur home video approach?

Other positive perspectives

Video is well suited to fulfil some aims of documentation:

Wittenburg & Mosel (following Himmelmann):

“… the corpus should consist of a variety of text types and genres... Multimedia (sound and video) recordings form the basis of the documentation work.”

Documentation genres (Johnson & Dwyer)

GenreInteraction: conversation, verbal contest, interview, meeting/gathering,

riddling, consultation, greeting/leave-taking, humor, insult/praise, letterExplanation: procedure, recipe, description, instruction, commentary, essay,

report/newsPerformance: narrative, oratory, ceremony, poetry, song, drama, prayer,

lament, jokeTeaching: textbook, primer, workbook, reader, exam, guide, problemsAnalysis: dictionary, word-list, grammar, sketch, field notes

Register informal/conversational, formal, honorific, jargon, baby/caretaker talk, joking, foreigner talk

Style ordinary speech, code-switching, play language, metrical organization, parallelism, rhyming, nonsense/unintelligible speech

Excellent for performances - things which can be performed and experienced repeatedly

Other ‘positives’

Good backup for audio recordingFiles less likely to change so can be held more

cheaply off/near-line (but care about migration)may not be relevant in the YouTube era

Conclusions

Community contexts (local viewing and manipulation) best but infrastructure is least likely to support it

Handing video production to community, allied with claims about documentation potential of video, means that an entirely new paradigm of documentation may be needed!

File preservation under fixed resources - we need some rational value measures