questioning the role of video in language documentation & archiving: is a moving picture worth...

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

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

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 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.


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


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


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


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.)


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?


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


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...)


Community-orientationcommunity oriented contentmembers will best know what/how to shootwhy should linguist shoot video at all?


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 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)


“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


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


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

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


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


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


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)

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

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?

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


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!


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


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


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) ???

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

linguisticsencourage us to look at diverse phenomenachallenge our methodologiesprovide 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

questioning the role of video in language documentation & archiving: is a moving picture worth...

Documents

video slide

data video

video camera

video recording

video content

video rise

potential of video

massage video