Video and Language Documentation: panacea or madness? David Nathan Endangered Languages Archive School of Oriental and African Studies University of London www.hrelp.org

Introduction There are a variety of costs of using and preserving video And advantages Do these align for language documentation and its preservation? How do we measure value?

Costs and demands Cost of equipment Power needs cameras time for selection etc associated equipment tripod power mics and cables cases etc Power needs

Unstable technology Cameras, carriers and formats all changing rapidly confusion of choice incompatibilities migration demands obsolescence 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 unclear skills video verité and representation for archiving

Annotation Necessary for access - video opaque; need transcriptions or descriptive text to access and therefore use Costs of annotation Additional phenomena to be annotated Precisely 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 resources how measured? demand (download, references, derivatives..) draw value adding effectiveness

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? or because video is just that special! (two extremes, of course) Video is NOT special because 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 products Communities can use products directly Community 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) Interaction: conversation, verbal contest, interview, meeting/gathering, riddling, consultation, greeting/leave-taking, humor, insult/praise, letter Explanation: procedure, recipe, description, instruction, commentary, essay, report/news Performance: narrative, oratory, ceremony, poetry, song, drama, prayer, lament, joke Teaching: textbook, primer, workbook, reader, exam, guide, problems Analysis: 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 recording Files 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 POint 2 - new paradigm - methodologies, aims, audiences, genres