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Questioning the role of video in
language documentation & archiving:
is a moving picture worth 1,000 texts?
ELDP training March 2010
David Nathan
[email protected]
Endangered Languages Archive
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
www.hrelp.org
The rise and rise of video
Increase in claims about video
Rise from about 25% to 75% of ELDP applicants
ELDP Panel has been demanding that some
applicants make video
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
Goals and methodology of language
documentation
One size fits all
Himmelman:
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.
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 video
swimming 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
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
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
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.)
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?
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
vs
Video exponents describe the potential of video but few
documenters actually have these goals
Goals and methodology of language
documentation
Many phenomena can't be represented (cf
Harrison):
complex family structures and their terminologies
changes 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...)
Goals and methodology of language
documentation
Community-orientation
community oriented content
members will best know what/how to shoot
why should linguist shoot video at all?
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
The nature of the video medium
Uninventing the massage
Video is compelling, holistic, humanistic
Video “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)
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
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
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 tripod
things that are inevitably analogue such as lenses,
lighting
Workflow and workload
Disorder of magnitudes
Skills, workload, intrusion, volumes - all increase
by orders of magnitude
skills - equipment, shooting, editing, production
equipment - choice, usage, maintenance
power supplies
capturing, conversion
annotation
editing, production
data volumes
Workflow and workload
Video processing workflow (Wootton):
“shoot and edit sympathetically … convert to a useful
format"
bringing the video into the system - ingesting
temporal preprocessing - dealing with timing
spatial preprocessing - dealing with sizing
color correction - grading and picture quality
noise removal - cleaning it up
audio preparation
encoding the content
postprocessing and delivery
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) identify
fallacy that annotation etc can be done later
video amplifies the value of event-participant knowledge
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 "nondestructive 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)
Community skills and needs
On Hippocrisy
Hippocratic approach: working ‘for the benefit of
the ill’
Video offers a good candidate for:
community involvement
skills transfer
creating directly usable materials, including for
revitalisation
Community skills and needs
ELAN isn’t a usable presentation
but 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?
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
Data portability and archiving
Archivism:
skewed proportion of discussion about technology
instead of methodology, technique and goals
technical parameters as proxy for quality and effective
outcomes
hides severe limitation on dissemination of “raw” video
But technical advice has also been selective!
Data portability and archiving
Shooting technique and preservation quality:
camera movement and poor picture quality can
overwhelm compression algorithms
so 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
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 reencoding inevitable
Editing should be done from high resolution or
uncompressed versions
Data portability and archiving
Storage costs may have to be revisited:
if highly compressed MPEG2 no longer accepted
if 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) ???
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
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
Conclusion
Video can:
add to the representational methods used by
linguistics
encourage us to look at diverse phenomena
challenge our methodologies
provide new and effective ways of disseminating
language and cultural events and knowledge
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
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!
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