Category Archives: Digital Archival

Audio Dominant Texts and Text Dominant Audio

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As linguistics and language documentation interface with digital humanities there has been a lot of effort to time-align texts and audio/video materials. At one level this is rather trivial to do and has the backing of comercial media processes like subtitles in movies. However, at another level this task is often done in XML for every project (digital corpus curation) slightly differently. At the macro-scale the argument is that if the annotation of the audio is in XML and someone wants to do something else with it, then they can just convert the XML to whatever schema they desire. This is true.

However, one antidotal point that I have not heard in discussion of time aligned texts is specifications for Audio Dominant Text vs. Text Dominant Audio. This may not initially seem very important, so let me explain what I mean.
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InField

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I have been working on describing the FLEx software eco-system (for both a blog post and an info-graphic). In the process I googled "language documentation" workflow and was promptly directed to resources created for InField and aggregated via ctldc.org. An amazing set of resources. the ctldc.org website is well put together and the content from InField 2010 and 2008 is amazing - I which I could have been there. I am almost convinced that most SIL staff pursuing linguistic fieldwork should just go to InField... But it is true that InField seems to be targeted at someone who has had more than one semester of linguistics training.

Language and Culture Documentation v.s. Cultural Digital Natives

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I feel that in the language and culture documentation community that there is a tension between “documenting” and “globalizing”. In the sense that what we as digital natives and cultural technologists think is “living” is in part “documenting”.

Now, in some sense “Language Documentation” is an academic pursuit of its own right independent of linguistics if it has a plan and tries to capture elements of the expression of the culture and language as it is spoken or acted out. I think there is a bit of confusion in the literature as linguists move from linguistics to language development and community development. This is particularly evident with the use of video in language documentation. Continue reading →

The Look of Language Archive Websites

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This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time… But was last updated on April 21, 2013 at 8:54 pm.

This the start of a cross-language archive look at the current state of UX design presenting Content generated in Language Documentation.

http://www.rnld.org/archives
http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/language_archives

http://paradisec.org.au/

http://repository.digiarch.sinica.edu.tw/index.jsp?lang=en

http://alma.matrix.msu.edu/

http://cla.berkeley.edu/

http://www.thlib.org/

http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/welcome.html

Leave Typology to the Typologists: I am a Linguist

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This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time… But was last updated on < ?php the_modified_date() ?> at < ?php the_modified_time()?>.

A User Experience look at Linguistic Archiving

In a recent paper Jeremy Nordmoe, a friend and colleague, states that:

Because most linguists archive documents infrequently, they will never be experts at doing so, nor will they be experts in the intricacies of metadata schemas.

My initial reply is:

You are d@#n right! and it is because archives are not sexy enough!

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Permanently accesable? to whom?

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This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time... But was last updated on < ?php the_modified_date() ?> at < ?php the_modified_time()?>.

Photo of the Bush House


Bush house: the BBC World Service is leaving its home after 71 years
Photo: Paul Grover via The Telegraph


There has recently been some discussion on the about the BBC selling its production facilities and moving from the Bush House to somewhere else. The BBC world service has been a major player in radio and oral culture in Great Britain and around the world for 71 years. A lot of history has been reported by the service. And the BBC's records (including its archive) have oral histories of a variety of world events for the last 71 years in a variety of languages (Wikipedia has a brief description of the collections at the BBC.). Continue reading →

Useful or Not?

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This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time... But was last updated on < ?php the_modified_date() ?> at < ?php the_modified_time()?>.

The online version of the SIL Bibliography contains a subset of over 29,000 citations from the more than 40,000 publications representing 75 years of SIL International's language research in over 2,700 languages.

Finding Resources through SIL.org's (as of 2 August 2012) Bibliography can be a challenge at times - Maybe even a time-wasting endeavor. Time wasting because it might not be very useful to consult the online Bibliography.

The challenging aspect which affects usefulness is primarily three fold:

  1. Items known by SIL to have been created by SIL staff may or may not be listed. (The on-line Bibliography is a sub-set.)
  2. Items listed in the Bibilography may or may not have digitally accessible resources.
  3. Items created by SIL staff may or may not be in the bibliography because they have not been submitted to the Language and Culture Archive (managing division of the SIL Bibliography).

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The Citation Problem

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This post is a open draft! It might be updated at any time… But was last updated on < ?php the_modified_date() ?> at < ?php the_modified_time()?>.

In a team framework where there are several members of a research team and the job requirements call for the sharing of bibliographic data (of materials referenced) as well as the actual resources being referenced. In this environment there needs to be a central repository for sharing both kinds of data. This is true for small localized (geographically) groups as well as large distributed research teams. New researchers joining a existing team need to be able to “plug-in” to existing foundational work on the project and be able to access bibliographic data as well as the resources those bibliographic details point to. It is my point here to outline some of the current challenges involved in trying to overcoming the collaborative obstacle when working in the fields of Linguistics and Language Documentation.1

Bibliographic Data v.s Citation Data

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Notes

  1. ↑1 This sentiment is echoed by many in the world of science. Here is someone on Zetero’s forums [INSERT LINK]. (Though Zetero does claim to combat some of these issues.)