Sound and Unsound Documentation:

David Nathan

Questions about the roles of audio in language documentation

Endangered Languages ArchiveSchool of Oriental and African StudiesUniversity of Londonwww.hrelp.org

A paradigm shift?

From evidence to performance…

Documentation output

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. These recordings should be associated with an orthographic or phonemic transcription, a translation in one of the major languages of the world, and/or glossings in a local lingua franca and English…”

Documentation output

Johnson & Dwyer:“GenreInteraction: conversation, verbal contest, interview, meeting/gathering,

riddling, consultation, greeting/leave-taking, humor, insult/praise, letterExplanation: procedure, recipe, description, instruction, commentary, essay,

report/newsPerformance: narrative, oratory, ceremony, poetry, song, drama, prayer,

lament, jokeTeaching: textbook, primer, workbook, reader, exam, guide, problemsAnalysis: 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”

A paradigm shift?

Sound as evidence in documentary linguistics …data not independent of a theory which uses itwhat is it? Disk, sound recording, file, file + metadata,

transcription etchow to represent and store ithow to present itwhat to do with it

Recorded/recording events as performances

Reifications of pattern or ideal Distinguish between event and record of it –

(fundamental for documentary linguistics) Repeatable, comparable; implies genre, audience Assists with protocol (attributes and participation) Allows editing to be methodologically possible Links us to existing fields’ knowledge and experience,

e.g. radio, cinematography, performing arts, music, musicology, ethnography …

Archivism

However, what we got was archivism

Archivism: capitulation of language documenters to the agenda and priorities of archives and information technology

Why did this happen?for historical reasonsrapid changes in technologywe left a vacuum

From evidence to archivism

Positive aspects of archivism - for some, for now, endangered languages field is luckier than others clear imperative to archive data benefits of new technologies (media, storage, convergence) funding and resources: DoBeS, EMELD, HRELP etc

However may be short-lived we are thrust into competing with entities like banks not enough contribution to language strengthening etc not nurturing documentary linguistics a 'productivity paradox' as experienced by the financial sector?

What have we missed?

Contact with wisdom and experience of established fields e.g. radio/broadcasting (eg mics, MD) cinematography (eg quality and

specialisation) journalism (eg equipment handling) audio archives (linguists had

input to IASA before 80s or so)

What have we missed?

Woodbury: most developments are "what's been happening around the emergence of a documentary linguistics", particularly technology, which has raised expectations more than changed practices

Examples

(Schüller) audio professionals use the trained ear as evaluator of quality, while linguists prefer wave-forms etc cf value of binaural recording

media people know that signals emanate from events but do not represent them

recording to edit

Lost opportunities?

Technical stereo, binaural monitoring while recording (headphones) environment and psychoacoustics microphones and handling editing

Content everyday expressions, eg Yuwaalaraay ngarigaa capturing environment/eliminating environment preludes to stories that explain who is talking and why etc.

Wider question is: in a mature documentary linguistics, is there a clear, or even valid, boundary between these two?

Did we get what we needed?

What did we get?advice about formats, parameters, what to avoid'silver bullet' equipment and formats fundamentalism and format wars

What do we need? If we continue to be 'lone wolf' fieldworkers, how to get good quality signals? Quality is relative to purpose. But given exhortations to make 'best record', what influences quality?

What influences audio quality?

A large number of factors: physical environment (inside, outside) control/management of environment acoustics - room, objects microphone selection, placement, handling, compatibility mono/stereo/binaural sources of noise/interference recorder and recording medium handling

Clearly these span fields: do they tell us anything about the scope of documentary linguistics?

Disappearing recorders

Zounds! Where’s my recorder? storage (eg iPod etc) A-D and storage (eg laptop) transducer (microphone)

Reasons for using a recorder (not laptop) workflow quality assurance consistency power

There are principles involved!

How much sound?

Under archivism, repositories are seen to determine amount as well as quality of data

ELDP experience some applicants propose amounts of audio in terms of

technologies, eg flash cards only hold a few hours; or (on other hand) voice recorders can hold hundreds!

to get a grant! Understandable lurching back and forth between

extremes rapid changes in technology, and advice about it more information available about documentation agenda and

technologies competition for grants as opportunities in linguistics decrease?

How much sound?

Determined by lists of output types and genres?

Wittenburg & Mosel:

“… the corpus should consist of a variety of text types and genres.

Multimedia (sound and video) recordings form the basis of the documentation work. These recordings should be associated with an orthographic or phonemic transcription, a translation in one of the major languages of the world, and/or glossings in a local lingua franca and English…”

How much sound?

Johnson & Dwyer:“GenreInteraction: conversation, verbal contest, interview, meeting/gathering,

riddling, consultation, greeting/leave-taking, humor, insult/praise, letterExplanation: procedure, recipe, description, instruction, commentary, essay,

report/newsPerformance: narrative, oratory, ceremony, poetry, song, drama, prayer,

lament, jokeTeaching: textbook, primer, workbook, reader, exam, guide, problemsAnalysis: 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”

How much sound?

Possible answers :distinguish recording from outputs/products (incl

archive deposit as one output)ELDP/ELAR: demonstrate 10% commitmentlet language community members and academic

peers judge, not archives or technologies

Un-sound documentation?

Johnston & Schembri: Documenting AUSLAN no writing or widely-used transcription system no standardization associated with the culture and

history of writing no written literature; little known about genres etcno possibility of processing, eg corpus work or 'text

mining‘

Un-sound documentation?

Johnston sees tools like MPI’s ELAN as the equivalent of 'writing' for signed languages

Problems annotating video for SL also raise issues being questioned in mainstream linguisticseg existence and atomicity of grammatical categories

Sound interfaces

Spoken Karaim and ShoeHorn

Run

Is audio the prime representation?

Multi-tiered, multi-scoped annotation cf recent ELAP workshop where meaning in documentation seen as: at different linguistic levelschanging and ongoing over timemessy, irreconcilable, contesteddrawing on meanings and texts outside the text in

questionSuggests that audio recording is merely one

(important!) aspect of the documenter’s toolset

Other questions

Who does the recording? Can community members only use cassettes? What changes if we shoot video as well? Are community members more motivated if they can

shoot video? Would we collect data by phone if there was sufficient

bandwidth? What audio resources are most effective for language

strengthening? Have we conflated fieldwork methodology with

documentation’s outputs?

Conclusions

In language documentation, a twin shift to data orientation and digitisation

has led us into domains where there is a wealth of existing experience, which we can not easily tap into, while competing against those who we can't possibly match

Treat audio as a way to capture various kinds of performances, not as the object of description

We are lacking interfaces and software for working with and presenting audio

Thank you