Thomas Widlok

“ The current tendency is clearly towards open access. However, with increasing commoditisation, and possibly with the increasing disappearance of languages, the tendency may shift towards restricting access. The community of researchers now considers cultural heritage a treasure, but to some it may become a burden, too. The value of archiving may itself change in the future. It is not possible to foresee these developments, since our knowledge increases as language documentation grows. ”

“ The archivists and the technical groups involved insist that regulating access to the digital resources, as well as how to best organise these corpora, is not their responsibility, but that it remains that of the researchers in close cooperation with representatives of those who contributed to the data corpus. While this initially promises a new and wider scope for providing and sharing data with communities, it also creates some enduring problems for the researchers involved. Archiving technology is indeed changing in some fundamental ways how we generate and share knowledge. ”

“ For myself and many colleagues, a major incentive to engage with digital archiving was to seek a strategy for coping with an ever-increasing private collection of audio- and videotapes, originating from various research projects over the years, materials for which it became ever more difficult to find a machine that would allow the data to be used in the future. ”

“ Digital archives with Internet access face the additional practical problem of restricting something once it is out in the public domain. It is quite possible to imagine a situation in which materials, despite being technically accessible, become factually impossible to use because they would harm relationships. For instance, while researchers tend to assume that privacy rights decrease with time (as persons die) , this may not be universally true, as—in many other contexts—people do not want unrestricted viewing of images relating to deceased members of their community. ”

“ Publishing non-academic texts is one such way that shapes social relations. They are not just spin-offs from what we actually do but they are directly implicated in the social relations of property rights, and therefore should be considered an integral part of any language documentation. Another means is the installation of regional data servers which allow communities with restricted Internet access to use the corpus locally and, at the same time, functions as an important step in appropriately locating due recognition. ”

“ The versatility of sessions as data clips is well established since YouTube and other Internet platforms have become ubiquitous sources. What is occasionally overlooked is the extent to which the often diffuse complexity of speech events and of ethnographic situations in which language is spoken becomes modularised with hard and fast boundaries so that we take these models to be true representations of the events from which they originate. ”

“ Technically, the question of access rights to the collected data is solved in the sense that the archive allows researchers to categorise their data into different levels of access. Funding agencies like the Volkswagen Foundation would like the default level to be set at open and public so that all data (and not just the metadata) is openly accessible unless a specific reason is given to make it a temporarily restricted source. In fact, most project teams tend to see it the other way around. They open up very few selected show pieces for which there is open access. ”

“ More generally, people who may have agreed (even with their signature) to have material on public display may change their mind as they begin to realise what the Internet is and what open access may imply. ”

“ There have to be default procedures for regulating access in the long term, but these have to be necessarily preliminary in the sense that they do not exist independently of the social relationships that do change over time.
Social practice Finally, there is a layer of property relations which ultimately falls under the responsibility of each researcher and which will vary not just between field sites, but also between researchers. Many researchers who have worked with the same people for two decades have an informal agreement with people in the field. ”

“ If we did that, then the corpus would be basically dead, a body in the true sense of the word. The power of large-scale electronic collections, such as those we see growing at this moment in time, is that they go beyond the single efforts and capacity of individual researchers. The downside of this is that each researcher only has limited influence on the overall product over time. The regulatory powers are much more constrained than in a traditional single-authored data collection such as a grammar, word list or collection of texts. ”

“ The best that one can hope for is that, on the basis of the Code of Conduct, language documentation does not create new conflicts, and that it does not lend itself easily for one faction or interest group to dominate others. The contracts or agreements should not create the illusion that with these regulations in place conflicts are eliminated. ”

“ Although there is a general tendency in archiving for resources to open up as time goes by (as the collection survives individuals, for instance) , there is no categorical reason why access should not also be tightened up after a while, for instance if abuse has been occurring. Researchers and consultants could take advantage of the fact that regulations can be created with some sort of inbuilt shelf life date by which past decisions have to be reconfirmed or revised as a consequence of evolving social relations. ”

“ Since all members contribute to the data collection in different ways and at different times, the result is an open corpus very unlike the typical ethnographic monograph or conventional linguistic collection of folk-stories that tend to be holistic if not in scope then at least with regard to the fact that they are presented as a book or a similarly bounded entity. Ideally, the new digital corpora are supposed to grow even after the funding period has ended as researchers add to it and work on it for their various projects, and to various degrees this ideal is in fact realised. ”

“ Just as an organisation of the corpus in terms of sessions seems inevitable in the context of digital archiving, the same holds for the creation of metadata files that organise the data itself. To begin with, the sheer size of the data collections discussed here makes metadata essential. There is no easy way to find relevant cues if one has to go through hours of audio or video recording unless there is metadata that provides hints on the contents of the recording. ”

“ Correspondingly, archivists present metadata as the most critical resource for preventing the small data cemeteries mentioned above from being merged into huge data cemeteries. At this stage it becomes clear that, even with direct community involvement in compiling the corpus, digital archiving does not comply to the ideal of a dialogical research exercise with no power differentials. Clearly, the researchers who formulate the metadata (specifying participants, location, genres etc.) ”

“ This is the weak point in most regulations of this sort, since the “community of speakers” is a vague concept, at best, and an outright fictional “body”, at worst. Community organisations are known to be highly flexible and prone to conflict, fission and faction fighting. Projects should be aware that “the creators” or “the consultants” are not the same as the organisations with whom the contract has been made. As the case may be, a project team may draw up contracts with different bodies (just as consultants may enter into a contract with more than one research team) . ”

“ An inevitable trade-off in this development is that researchers partly lose control over the end product and, potentially, so do their informants. The researcher may be able to discuss publications with informants before they get printed, and will seek consent before things are recorded and put into an archive, but there is no way that a constantly growing and changing body of data that is subject to collective work and revision could be controlled in the same way. ”

“ Since individual researchers differ in the ways in which they restrict access to a source that he or she has collected, it is important to clearly mark who made decisions of access, and preferably also why. ”

“ A layered model of property and access rights Many conflicts and misunderstandings surrounding property rights in data result from the fact that different layers of property rights are not sufficiently distinguished. ”

“ Every discipline has its early adapters who embrace the new recording devices while others attempt to cling to other formats that appear to be more holistic, easier to manage and easier to adapt to local requirements. What I have suggested in this chapter is that researchers across the whole spectrum need to realise that the new technologies do not solve problems of access or contextualisation, but rather shed a particularly sharp light onto these problems, which can be a first necessary step towards addressing the issues at hand. ”

“ An analysis of research implications regarding digital archives of spoken language In the framework of programmes for documenting endangered languages such as those funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and the Arcadia Fund, unprecedented amounts of audiovisual data on endangered languages and cultures from around the world are currently being electronically archived. ”

“ The largest part of the body is limited access with two thresholds: the lower threshold consists of an automatised declaration with which the user must agree along similar lines as agreements to Internet downloads and other web services. ”

“ The collaborators in the field, in turn, then have a fairly good idea what the research is all about and are able to clearly signal when to switch off the camera or recorder if they want something to be off record. ”

“ Having said that, this of course is also true for many, if not all, data compilations that field researchers have hitherto come up with, be it text, audio, video or other. Context can never been exhausted, and there is always a selection of context. ”

“ Ethical issues http://www.hrelp.org/languages/resources/orel/ethical.html Language Archive Technology, Arbil Metadata Editor, Browser & Organizer Tool http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/arbil/ Footnotes ↑ For the importance of participatory frameworks for understanding spoken language see William Hanks (1996: 142) .↑ For a list of relevant documents, see International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) ’s Copyright & Other Intellectual Property Rights and The Hans Rausing Project for Endangered Languages’ Online Resources for Endangered Languages. Ethical issues in Online Sources. ”

“ The expectation is that the materials collected will be more readily available (and for much longer) than previously, and available in ways that would benefit a number of different groups of potential users, including speakers who want to revitalise their languages and cultures. ”