questioning the role of video in language documentation & archiving: is a moving picture worth...
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Questioning the role of video in language documentation & archiving:
is a moving picture worth 1,000 texts?
ELDP training March 2010David [email protected]
Endangered Languages ArchiveSchool of Oriental and African StudiesUniversity of Londonwww.hrelp.org
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The rise and rise of video
Increase in claims about videoRise from about 25% to 75% of ELDP applicantsELDP Panel has been demanding that some
applicants make video
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Themes
Goals and methodology of language documentation One size fits all
The nature of the video medium Uninventing the massage
Workflow and workload Disorder of magnitudes
Community skills and needs On Hippocrisy
Data portability and archiving Handling the bytes that feed
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
One size fits allHimmelman:
The core of a language documentation, then, is constituted by a comprehensive and representative sample of communicative events as natural as possible. Given the holistic view of linguistic behavior, the ideal recording device is video recording.
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Cultural and cognitive aspects can be documented or augmented by video (examples from Harrison) counting methods/systems locative expressions behaviours or appearances of plants animals etc that are
described as part of language-encoded knowledge: information about plant toxicity and preparation could usefully be videoswimming formations (eg Marovo people of Solomon Islands who
have rich set of terms for fish behaviour and its relationships to the calendar and hunting)
Gila Pima (Arizona) name a plum tree "dog's testicles", and an edible banana "looks like an erection" (umm, what will the videos show?)
However, David Crystal estimates that such culturally/environmentally specific aspects are only about 10% of any languages’ content
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Discourse and genre distinguishing participants (McConvell) transparently capturing “stories” (Wittenburg)
Adding or enhancing methodology stimulus materials the camera adds theatricality (Jukes) the camera as a participant (Atkins) enhance transcription through motivating community participation
Sign language work treat video as inscription cameras, lighting, orientation, clothing etc
Appreciated by communities
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Documentation can’t aim to capture everything (Austin) And the video camera cannot (cf next section) Argument for accountability has caused confusion
between events and recordings. Result: fantasy that video is what happened and provides empirical evidence for all kinds of claims
Argument: video can do X => we should do video fails without goals and methodology for X
Many pro-video arguments could be equally applied to capturing other phenomena in other media: e.g. palatography collecting other text-based metadata eg on social setting
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
There must be different methodologies (linguistic AND video) for different purposes (cf. sign)
Himmelmann:[each potential discipline’s usages] influence the
recording and presentation of the data inasmuch as certain kinds of information are indispensable for a given analytical procedure (no phonetic analysis is possible without some high-quality sound recording, no analysis of gestures is possible without videotaping, etc.)
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
So if there are distinct methodologies for different purposes (e.g. sign)how adequate could a generic video be?how can video serve purposes that documenters don’t
have?
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Explicit claimed purposes for video:In ELDP applications, many applicants request funds
for video equipment but have no video-related documentation goals
vsVideo exponents describe the potential of video but few
documenters actually have these goals
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Many phenomena can't be represented (cf Harrison):complex family structures and their terminologieschanges in moon shape and phase (better as still
photos or diagrams); other calendric and geographic expressions
time and distance eg Tofa (Siberia) have words for the distance you can cover in a day on reindeer back
morphological, grammatical and most lexical information
(also relationships, staging, motivations, histories...)
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Community-orientationcommunity oriented contentmembers will best know what/how to shootwhy should linguist shoot video at all?
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Goals and methodology of language documentation
Video footage is not data video less “authentic” than audio - it frames with a hard edge
rather than “listens” to an environment video is more bounded, more intentional than audio selection (time/space), point of view etc video content is multifaceted
Video data example - traffic camera nature of data defined informs methodological
choices for capture of data
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The nature of the video medium
Uninventing the massageVideo is compelling, holistic, humanisticVideo “tells a story”
much of what we want to capture is already a story (Wittenburg)
There is a filmic language for telling stories - derives from human perception and narrative, plus 100 years of cinematic evolution
Filmmakers “pour scorn” on film-as-truth (Weaver)
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The nature of the video medium
“Shoot to edit” - dictum of filmmakers more than a recommendation for good filming, a
diagnostic for whole approach implies a view to methodology and outputs ethics inform editing, they do not exclude it
Limits: maximal: storyboards (pre-planned action and shots)minimal: one that generates data - the traffic camera
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The nature of the video medium
Filmer has to know the nature of the events (e.g. football vs. opera)
Video is not ideal for spontaneous events except: bounded situations with conventions, eg. dinner party for accidental capture of “treasures” (ie home movies)
Naivety of considering editing as “interference” editing is natural to the way we see and to the film medium story or message is achieved through editing linguists’ other work (from transcription to grammars) can be
understood as intense, informed editing objections to editing could be diagnostic of lack of relevant
methodologies/goals/skills Training required. Filmic skills must be learnt
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The nature of the video medium
Fieldworkers’ preferences in an age obsessed with light weight and miniaturisation are opposed to methods for making good video:robust tripodthings that are inevitably analogue such as lenses,
lighting
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Workflow and workload
Disorder of magnitudesSkills, workload, intrusion, volumes - all increase
by orders of magnitudeskills - equipment, shooting, editing, productionequipment - choice, usage, maintenancepower suppliescapturing, conversionannotationediting, productiondata volumes
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Workflow and workload
Video processing workflow (Wootton):“shoot and edit sympathetically … convert to a useful
format"bringing the video into the system - ingestingtemporal preprocessing - dealing with timingspatial preprocessing - dealing with sizingcolor correction - grading and picture qualitynoise removal - cleaning it upaudio preparationencoding the contentpostprocessing and delivery
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Workflow and workload
Annotation:could easily involve a time ratio of up to 100 (1 hour of
video may take100 hours to process)in practice, most documenters do not annotate the
phenomena that they did (or didn’t) identifyfallacy that annotation etc can be done later
video amplifies the value of event-participant knowledge
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Workflow and workload
Data volumes, eg for a 4 GB DVD project: project files, originals, backups (for reversion), disk images 5 minutes of MPEG-2 video at DVD-equivalent quality occupies ~
150 MB 5 minutes at DV quality (which you might use for editing), occupies
~ 1 GB (this is not studio quality which would be 5-6 GB) assuming semi-professional editing software that makes "non-
destructive editing … using an EDL or reference movie that retains all the source components intact"
total volume for the DVD production is ~ 100GB (which is largely the single copy of the original DV quality assets that are necessary for editing)
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Community skills and needs
On HippocrisyHippocratic approach: working ‘for the benefit of
the ill’Video offers a good candidate for:
community involvementskills transfercreating directly usable materials, including for
revitalisation
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Community skills and needs
ELAN isn’t a usable presentationbut it can be used as editor to generate VCDs etc
(Jukes)We’d need to observe what kinds of video are
current and effective in the community (McGill)Can video be put in community hands (unlike
other linguistic aspects) because it involves no linguistic methodology?
Do we patronise a language community by not applying worked-out methods?
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Data portability and archiving
Handling the bytes that feed(More pictures without captions / songs without titles etc)
there are standards, e.g. MPEG, ELAN (eaf)professional knowledge and equipment needed
for processing, encoding, migration
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Data portability and archiving
Archivism:skewed proportion of discussion about technology
instead of methodology, technique and goalstechnical parameters as proxy for quality and effective
outcomeshides severe limitation on dissemination of “raw” video
But technical advice has also been selective!
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Data portability and archiving
Shooting technique and preservation quality:camera movement and poor picture quality can
overwhelm compression algorithmsso poor techniques (eg non-use of tripod,
unnecessary pan or zoom, non-awareness of scene evolution) cause the same "loss of information" that has been so villified in the case of compressed audio
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Data portability and archiving
Necessity for compression violates the whole rationale for digital preservation: MPEG conversions introduce the same “generational loss” as
analogue copying. “Analogue ... generational loss is supposed to be eliminated when you record the video digitally. But this is only the case if no format conversion takes place during the digital transfer. Changing the encoding from one type to another results in generational losses even in the digital domain."
format refreshment or editing for mobilisation will make re-encoding inevitable
Editing should be done from high resolution or uncompressed versions
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Data portability and archiving
Storage costs may have to be revisited:if highly compressed MPEG2 no longer acceptedif distributed storage strategies such as suggested in
LAN 9 become commonplace, since costs vary according to scale of storage units
then Wittenburg's calculations (LAN 10) will not apply
Other archive costs:dissemination (genres, management of protocol) ???
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ELAR holdings by data type
This table analyses some data types of interest for a representative sample (70%) of holdings
Date type by volume and number of files, sorted by volume
Data type Volume (MB) Files
audio 360,411 6,312
video 208,995 895
image 28,592 2,221
msword 223 404
pdf 196 134
eaf 33 176
text 32 781
lex 9 29
trs 5 246
xls 1 19
imdi 1 26
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ELAR holdings by data type
This table analyses some data types of interest for a representative sample (70%) of holdings
Date type by number of files and volume, sorted by number of files
Data type Files Volume (MB)
audio 6,312 360,411
image 2,221 28,592
video 895 208,995
text 781 32
msword 404 223
trs 246 5
eaf 176 33
pdf 134 196
lex 29 9
imdi 26 1
xls 19 1
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Conclusion
Video can: add to the representational methods used by
linguisticsencourage us to look at diverse phenomenachallenge our methodologiesprovide new and effective ways of disseminating
language and cultural events and knowledge
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Conclusion
A comparison: video vs multimedia why few exhortations to produce multimedia?multimedia:
distinguishes medium from mode of knowledge representation
richer and more explicit interleaving of various types of knowledge
imposes its workload/costs in more appropriate ways
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Conclusion
Generic, amateur video fails to respect participants by not recognising linguistic specialisation, complexity or expertise to the same degree as “real” linguistic work
Naive video achieves “authenticity” mainly by not editing - and thereby not producing usable products!
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Conclusion
There is a lot of tradition in evaluating the descriptive value of linguistic work, but little in defining the documentation value of video
If video really does represent the claimed range of linguistic phenomena, it is a key mode of documentation: then documenters (and their teachers) need to pay much closer attention to goals and methodologies!
It is not clear that it is linguists who should be making video