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
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
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