Archiving

9 February 2009
David Nathan, Director of the Endangered Languages Archive, at SOAS, and I are back in Tokyo at the invitation of Toshihide Nakayama of ILCAA, the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies for 10 days to run a workshop on language documentation that follows up our 2008 workshop. This year we are taking a different tack and focusing the week of seminars and practical sessions on the principles and practices of archiving endangered languages materials. The week begins on Monday (today) with preparations in the morning and David’s public lecture on “Archiving endangered language materials” in the afternoon. Classes begin in earnest on Tuesday and run until Friday, with sessions from 10am to 5pm each day. There will be 15 attendees, mostly students who are doing fieldwork in various locations around the world. Details of the workshop can be found here.
The topics we plan to cover include:

• Language documentation and language archiving – major issues
• Audio – good practices refresher
• Audio recording – how to make great audio
• Data and metadata – good practices refresher
• Data management practical
• Workflow for archiving
• Mobilisation and delivery of language materials
• Transcription, annotation, translation – good practices refresher
• IP and ethical issues in the delivery, usage, and archiving of materials

There will be group work in the practical sessions and a final discussion with presentations by the attendees on the last day. If time and energy permit I will blog about how the workshop goes and report on some of the outcomes.

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The Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR) was established at SOAS in January 2004, with the first deposits accepted in late 2005. Our initial priority was on preservation but recently the ELAR public catalogue was released and it will soon extend to providing access to materials (where permissions allow). To date, ELAR has received over 50 deposits and stores about 4 terabytes of data. Audio recordings make up about 60% of this (both in terms of the total number of files and the total volume of data).
ELAR was established primarily to preserve and disseminate data collected by grantees from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP) and by staff and students from the Endangered Languages Academic Programme (ELAP). Because language documentation is an emerging area that relies a lot on new techniques and technologies, ELAR also provides training, advice and support to ELDP grantees, ELAP staff and students, and others through international training workshops (see, for example, the various Rausing Room, the Linguistics Resources Room, and the pool of fieldwork equipment available to ELAP staff and students.
ELAR now has four staff, with David Nathan and Ed Garrett being card-carrying linguists and IT professionals, and technicians Tom Castle and Bernard Howard having specialist skills in digital and analogue audio techniques and equipment.
With these resources, skills and experience, ELAR is able to help people who want to archive resources for endangered languages, including individual and retired researchers who may not have alternative sources of equipment or advice. Dietrich Schüller, the former Director of the Austrian Phonogrammarchiv, has warned in a recent paper[.pdf] that the great majority of the world’s human cultural heritage is sitting unpreserved and uncatalogued on the shelves of individual researchers. We can help these researchers with preparing materials, including digitising and converting audio, as well as providing advice and training in how to create metadata and cataloguing information.
Over the last few years ELAR has collaborated with a number of individual researchers in preparing their materials for deposit:

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[From our man in Hawai’i and Melbourne – Nick Thieberger]
The Australian government has millions of dollars that it will be spending on what it calls the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support new technologies in research in Australia.

“Through NCRIS, the Government is providing $542 million over 2005-2011 to provide researchers with major research facilities, supporting infrastructure and networks necessary for world-class research.”

DEST released a paper outlining what it called ‘capabilities’ which it proposed to fund, and they were ALL in the sciences, including lots of shiny pointy instruments (synchrotron, new telescopes and so on) to do the whizzbang experiments that are so popular and capture the imagination of politicians. While the physical science community has amazing capacity to pull in big research dollars, there are not that many of them, and even fewer who actually want to use each of these very expensive instruments.
On the other hand, the Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS) community is huge, and also does the kind of work that, in the main, is immediately relevant to those who fund it (taxpayers). So, in the consultation that followed, the clamour of HASS proponents resulted in a new ‘capability’ being added to the ‘roadmap’, but without any funding (yet) associated with it. There will be an ‘Innovation White Paper’ announcement before the end of 2008, and the current roadmap leads to the White Paper.
All of this is important for us, as it is the bucket from which national infrastructure like a National Data Service may be funded, and where policies on standards for data repositories like PARADISEC will be set. It is where funding will come from for the national computer facility that houses the online version of the PARADISEC collection.

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After some effort PARADISEC has finally established a streaming server that can be used in normal web pages. This means that an online dictionary, for example, can have example headwords and sentences spoken, or video clips presented to illustrate a given word. You can see the trial version here, (NB this will only work with the Firefox browser and you will also need to pre-install the Annodex plugin).
For some time it has been troubling that we have no simple way of presenting media online in association with transcripts, especially when an archived field recording may be the only recording of a particular language. It should have been simple enough to access media on the web. After all, we do it on Youtube and other places. But we have been further constrained by really wanting all of this to be open source (freely available software) so that anyone with the right skills can replicate this setup and not have to pay. And we also wanted the process for getting material into an online presentation to follow on from normal fieldwork outcomes, in line with output from the tools typically used by a professional linguist (one who keeps up to date with the methods of their profession). When the archival form of the media exists in a repository, it should then be an automatable process to put it into a streaming server for access.

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Yesterday (27 October) was the first celebration of UNESCO’s world day of audio-visual heritage. The trailer on that website, put together from the holdings of various audio-visual archives around the world, gives a flavour of the kind of material that is held in audio and film/video archives worldwide. Australia is fortunate to have many cultural institutions that hold and look after material recorded in Australia: the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straid Islander Studies (AIATSIS), the National Library of Australia (NLA), the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and many others.

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So you want to preserve that MSWord novel, those spreadsheets, those AppleWorks fieldnotes forever?
The National Archives of Australia are ahead of you – they’ve developed free and open source software to help in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena! (XML Electronic Normalising for Archives – and I bet they thought hard to come up with the N).
I saw a demo of Xena a couple of years ago, and was greatly impressed by the potential of streamlining the workflow in digital text archives – by detecting the file formats of digital objects, and then converting them into open formats like XML for preservation. Databases remain the nightmare of course.
Anyway, there’s a new release – and here are the details.

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Digital archives of photos, films and recordings are springing up in Indigenous communities, and some of them are even Getting Funding, hurrah! The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving a million US dollars to the Northern Territory State Library System:

“a 2007 Access to Learning Award recognizes the Northern Territory Library for providing free computer and Internet access and training to impoverished indigenous communities… The award honours the innovative Libraries and Knowledge Centres (LKC) Program, which provides communities with free access to computers and the Internet, and helps Indigenous Territorians to build digital collections of their culture through the Our Story database.”

They’ve got Knowledge Centres at Milingimbi, Wadeye, Peppimenarti, Umbakumba, Angurugu, Pirlangimpi, Milikapiti, Barunga, Ti Tree, and Ltyentye Apurte.
…..As well, “Microsoft, a Global Libraries initiative partner, will donate US $224,000 in software and technology training curriculum to upgrade the organization’s 300 library computers.” [Weep for us Mac users]
The Our Story database is an adaptation of the classic Filemaker Pro Ara Irititja program developed by the artist and historian John Dallwitz for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara.

Ara Irititja, a project of the Pitjantjatjara Council, commenced in 1994 when it was realised that a large amount of archival material about Anangu was not controlled by or accessible to them. This material was held in museums, libraries and private collections. Items held by private individuals were often at risk of being damaged or irretrievably lost. To date, a major focus of Ara Irititja’s work has been retrieving and securing such records for the benefit of Anangu and the broader Australian community.

The great advantage of Filemaker Pro was that it was basically off-the-shelf and basically fairly easy for people to use. There have been elaborate proposals, but going beyond glamour to making things work in remote communities is a very large step.

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