Judith Aston and Paul Matthews

“ Once living together in relatively stable rural hamlets, the Uduk-speaking people are now dispersed across national borders, with some living in countries as far afield as the USA. James’ recordings reveal how the survival of a vernacular language can help to create a powerful network of overlapping memory and practice, through which old patterns and traditions can re-appear even in the most “modern” of circumstances. ”

“ We are working with a colleague at the Oxford Academy of Documentary Film, who is helping James with the basic digitisation, logging and cataloguing. Logging of video is being done with Final Cut Pro, with clips then being imported together with audio and still images into the desktop media asset management system Expression Media. This enables metadata to be exported as XML and then transformed in order to structure the interface. Additional segmentation for video clips will be achieved using a tool such as Frameline47, with subclip metadata exported to MPEG-7 and integrated. ”

“ This world will be brought to life through sound and imagery with the fieldwork recordings speaking for themselves wherever possible. First and foremost we want the user to be able to engage directly with these recordings and for the story of James’ ongoing fieldwork to unfold through this process. In order to achieve this aim, we are exploring different ways to provide contextual commentary on the recordings, to give temporal and thematic coherence to the experience without locking the user into overly didactic or linear forms of delivery. ”

“ Digital technologies have, however, opened up a new set of possibilities through which a body of work can be kept together and preserved in its entirety. These technologies also offer the facility to link fieldwork recordings to contextual commentary through the creative use of metadata. ”

“ The organised selection of materials will extend this theme of resilience by enabling further engagement with the ways in which displaced people thrown together are able, or at least are trying, to turn their experiences into art, into fun with language, dramatic narratives, provocative enactments, witty songs, resurgent dances, and music. ”

“ At the very least, they will act as a testimony to the Uduk-speaking peoples’ awareness and self-knowledge of their predicament, to reveal how their deeply impassioned modes of understanding are based on conscious and ongoing reflection on their position in the world. ”

“ In order to create a world of experiences, with which people can empathise despite its initial “otherness”, Aston has been pushing the boundaries of interface design to create flexible ways of engaging with fieldwork recordings that are poetic as opposed to informational in approach. ”

“ There is the Sudan Open Archive of the Rift Valley Institute, for example (administered by Dan Large) , focusing mainly on scarce or vulnerable written materials and the ephemeral literature of the development agencies. Visual images at present are limited to those already embedded in text as illustrations. Very different in style is the substantial and culturally focused website “Mursi Online”, built around the decades-long ethnographic work of David Turton among the Mursi of south-west Ethiopia. ”

“ For example, users might want to compare recordings across different time periods or they might want to explore a series of interlinked themes. Another possibility would be to compare recordings of actual events with interview footage of peoples’ memories of these events. The materials are based on various combinations of observational recordings, interviews and informal conversations across audio, still and moving image formats. Flexibility can be built into the system to enable users to focus on a single medium or to look at them together. ”

“ Thumbnails initially represent the media objects, which are then enlarged when the user selects items of interest.
Figure 8. Architecture of fluid data prototype. Image by Judith Aston and Paul Matthews, 2010. In our HTML5 prototype, items may be selected according to theme and period/place, then brought into a media browser, which presents two main videos or images. A k-means cluster of resources according to metadata (with a set of binaries for each item reflecting inclusion or exclusion in a metadata term) results in the ability to juxtapose resources on the same theme by time and place. ”

“ Whilst some responded to the situation by defending their nation, others joined the armed resistance of the SPLA. Many found temporary security as international refugees in Ethiopia, whilst others opted for resettlement further afield in countries such as the USA. The book shows how the paths of those that have survived have converged and diverged in different places at different times, in such a way that there has not been a permanent severing of ties or cultural belonging. ”

“ Finally, we hope that the approaches and suggestions offered here will provide inspiration to others working in related areas, whether as academic fieldworkers, community activists or interested bystanders. ”