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

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  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) Genre 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