Video in Documentary linguistics Louise Ashmore David Nathan

Introduction  Who uses video?  How and why do linguists use video in language documentation?  What do you film when you use video? eg particular genres or events?  Do you plan how to film in terms of participants, setting, framing, lighting, sound?  What is the intended or possible future use of the video material you record?

Methodology  Video represents what is 'in frame' - when camera is on - therefore highly constructed  Relevant contextual information extends beyond the edge of the frame (socially, temporally, spatially) - equally important?  The oxymoron of “video data”  Should documenters use video to tell stories in the way that filmmakers do? If so, how?  Different techniques, genres and uses of 'video' (just as there are different genres for audio and print) - different resources and methodologies  Role of editing

Possible purposes  a record of a communicative event with significant visual/spatial aspect (gesture, eye gaze, sign language)  as elicitation  to produce films about contexts or cultural practices to accompany language resources (e.g. educational resources, records of agricultural practices, material culture)  as a back up record

The high cost of video  Cost of equipment, complex to produce  Intrusive in the field situation (relationships with language consultants, power, portability, cost) - losses?  Resource hungry (training, real time capture, data management, transfer, editing)  Storage costs (up to ~ £50 a year to store 1 min)  Unstable technology (changing hardware, formats and standards)  What metadata and analysis?  Archiving - expensive, requires compression!  Difficulties of accessing: identifying, bandwidth, players

Question  Should linguists really be shooting video?

Community orientation  Communities like video products  Communities can use products directly  Community can make video  does it only seem so because we take an amateur approach?  A new paradigm of documentation?

Discussion scenario 1  During her project, a linguist creates 100 hours of raw video. The archive asks her to make an appropriate selection for archiving.  is this reasonable?  how can she make the selection?  who are the stakeholders?  is this editing?  what happens to the unselected stuff?

Question  How are the goals of language documentation served and advanced by the use of video?  Are these proportionate to the costs?

Discussion scenario 1  An archive receives a video for deposit. It has no sound.  what are some possible reasons it has no sound?  what can/should be done?

Discussion scenario 3  Two people in a room of a house in a village discuss how to make a certain food  How would you approach video documentation of this event in terms of managing situations, techniques, metadata/contextual information if the intended use of the recording is: a)as a record of speaker narrative to be (archived and) made available to a range of researchers and community members b)as a language-learning resource c)for inclusion in a film for and about the community