Regarding Archiving of language documentation project

[Mayank Jain]

Dear All,

It would help us if someone could tell about the best practices in the area of archiving for language documentation project. The data will be in FLEx, ELAN, Raw videos and audios, Pictures, Notes etc. We don't have any experience in archiving till now, therefore any suggestion would aid us.

Mayank
Research Scholar
Delhi

[Hugh Paterson]

What are the requirements of the archive you are working with?

- Hugh Paterson III

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[Will Reiman]

Hello, Mayank; it is a pleasure to converse with you. There are several questions that will move this conversation forward:

• are you working with/for a particular organization?
• who are other stakeholders regarding the archiving of this data? This could be funders, government ministries, educational institutions, speech communities, etc.
• are you looking for recommendations for archiving on a local level (within your office or among your team) or on a professional level (dedicated archiving institutions such as Prodelise, SOAS, SIL-REAP, etc.)?

Archiving your documentation is an excellent idea. Glad you are deciding to start, and desire to start well.

-Will

Will Reiman

Language and Culture Documentation Specialist

Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics

will_...@gial.edu

[Mayank Jain]

Dear Hugh and Will,

Thanks for the replies. In our case we have recently started on language documentation project which is housed in a university department. We have planned to start working on 2-3 languages from January onward. Though we are at the initial state, we have decided to archive our data. So we are looking for the appropriate options for us. For specific questions, I would say the following:

Stakeholders: We have to decided on it. However, the home university, the government funding agency, speech communities should be part of it. We have decide on it.

We are exploring options for us. I suppose we would prefer archiving on a local level (within our team), if you could afford the resources. The dedicated institutions are good, but there are some issues e.g. we are not fully aware of their policies, how safe our data would be etc.

Having mentioned above details, I would like to add that these are our preliminary impression, we would decide after evaluating different options.

Mayank

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[Will Reiman]

Dear Mayank,

 

Glad to hear you are planning well from the start. Language documentation generates a large number of data files as a rule, so early planning on your archiving schema will pay great dividends to your sanity! Right now I am speaking about a professional archive; deciding on one at the start will help shape your process and intended products in very beneficial ways.

 

For help in deciding on the appropriate archive for your data, I recommend you read a work developed by one of my institution’s graduates:

 

Chang, Debbie. 2010. TAPS: Checklist for responsible archiving of digital language resources. Dallas, Texas: Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics MA Thesis.

 

You can find it here, as a pdf:

http://www.gial.edu/academics/student-theses/

 

As to archiving locally, this is essential as well. While your data corpus is in process, it needs to stay organized, and associated with metadata content for all items. This should look different from typical backup procedures, especially due to the developing structure that you will eventually want to port to the professional archive you choose. Your university’s IT department should want to assist you with developing this more local plan. It could be as simple as some hard-drives on a shelf, or perhaps integrated with your university’s local area network. I use SayMore (http://saymore.palaso.org/) to manage language data corpora, but it may not be the right software for you. (It works well for a single researcher managing their data, but is not designed for team approaches. I make it work for my team, but it is a bit challenging.)

 

So, read Debbie’s thesis (parts, anyway), and talk with your university’s computer people about all this. Tell us what you find out!

 

-Will

[Mayank Jain]

Dear Will,

Thanks for these vital suggestions and for the thesis. The thesis seems quite relevant for our purpose, thanks. We would keep in touch with you and the group regarding further development.

Mayank

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