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Peter K. Austin
While making the audio and video recordings it can be useful to take field-
notes, including rough transcriptions, translations, relevant recording meta-
data, diagrams, drawings, and notes that can serve as aide memoire for later
writing up or checking. Fieldnotes should be written in ball-point pen (not
pencil and not washable ink!) on good quality paper (ideally in a bound
notebook) using one side of the page only. As soon as possible after the
recording session fieldnotes should be checked and elaborated, and trans-
ferred to a digital form. It is amazing how rapidly one forgets what abbre-
viated notes made while recording and interviewing mean.
1
Digital text has a number of advantages: it is compact, stable, easy to
store, access, and index, and can express hypertextual relationships (links).
There are a large number of tools available to process text data (text edi-
tors, word processors, databases, browsers, etc), and well established liter-
acy traditions and knowledge of written text in many communities. How-
ever, it is less rich than audio and video as there is always loss of
information when ‘reducing language to writing’. Text needs to be con-
nected to richer recordings of speech events through time-aligned transcrip-
tions and hyperlinks (see examples below and elsewhere in this volume).
However, written documentation outputs in the form of books are highly
valued in many language communities and, for those where ICT resources
are not available or limited, will be the ideal form of product from a docu-
mentation project.
Labelling and metadata
Whatever the recording medium, it is important to rigorously label everything,
including tapes, disks, CDs, containers, fieldnote books (number all the
pages!) immediately, consistently, and uniquely (e.g. using date and sequence
number). Write this information with an indelible marker on the object itself,
since disks and tapes can become separated from their covers. It is also im-
perative that a proper record of metadata (data about the recorded data, see be-
low), such as speaker name, recording location, dialect, etc., is made at the
same time as the recordings are labelled. You can do this in a notebook or as a
computer file (create a structured file using a spreadsheet, database or Word
table, whatever is most convenient).
Chapter 4 – Data and language documentation
93
2.2. Metadata creation
Metadata is data about data, i.e. structured information about events, re-
cordings, and data files. It is usually represented as text (but not always,
e.g., it could be a spoken introduction track on a video or audio recording),
but it is a different type of media because it is collected and used differently
from other types. Typically metadata is collected and stored according to
some formal specification. Metadata is needed for proper description of the
data and to enable it to be found and used (see Bird and Simons 2003).
There are two main competing international standards for linguistic meta-
data, that promoted by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC)
and that promoted by the ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI), the former be-
ing less detailed than the latter. The choice of metadata format should be
made in consultation with the archives where the researcher intends to de-
posit the documentary materials (see Chapter 13).
There are several types of metadata:
1.
Cataloguing – information useful to identify and locate data, e.g. lan-
guage code, file ID number, recorder, speaker, place of recording, date
of recording, etc.
2.
Descriptive – information about the kind of data found in a file, e.g. an
abstract or summary of file contents, information about the knowledge
domain represented.
3.
Structural – for files that are organized in a particular way, a specification
of the file structure, e.g. that a certain text file is a bilingual dictionary.
4.
Technical – information about the kind of software needed to view a
document, details of file format, and preservation data.
5.
Administrative – background information such as a work log (indicating
when the files were last saved or backed up), records of intellectual
property rights, moral rights, and any access and distribution restrictions
imposed by researcher and/or community.
Note that information can be metadata for more than one purpose, depend-
ing on its nature and use, e.g. the identity of the speaker in an audio record-
ing could be relevant for cataloguing purposes and/or also for determining
access restrictions.
Table 1 provides an example of the different types of metadata associ-
ated with a computer file.
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Peter K. Austin
Table 1. Different types of metadata associated with a computer file
Cataloguing
Title: Sasak.dic; Collector: Peter K Austin; Speakers:
Yon Mahyuni, Lalu Hasbollah; Language code: SAS
Descriptive
Trilingual Sasak-Indonesian-English dictionary, linked to
finderlists, morpheme forms link to Sasak text collection
Structural
Dictionary entries with headword, part of speech, gloss in
Bahasa Indonesia and English, cross-references for semantic
relations; SIL FOSF record format
Technical
Shoebox 5.0 ASCII text file
Administrative
Open access to all; Last edited version dated 2004-06-25;
backup 2004-06-20 on DVD 012
Some linguistically-relevant descriptive metadata that you may wish to use
are: speaker (name, gender, age, place of birth, languages spoken, dialect,
education level), recorder (name, experience), date of recording, location of
recording, duration of recording, type (genre) of materials recorded, tran-
scriber (especially if different from the recorder), date of transcription, loca-
tion of transcription, location of all digital files, media and text (and location
of archive copies).
2.3. Capturing
Capture refers to the encoding and transfer of an analogue recording (as on
a cassette or reel-to-reel tape) or text written on paper to the digital domain
as a computer file. In many cases, modern ICT means that audio and video
recordings are “born digital” and can be transferred to computers without a
separate capture process, unless transcoding is involved (see Chapter 13).
When using digital capture software it is important to make sure you use
appropriate settings. It is also advisable to transfer fieldnotes from note-
books to computer files, ideally as soon as possible after recording so you
do not forget notes, abbreviations, and comments. As for recording, it is
imperative to name your computer files consistently and clearly, making
sure that you should not rely on directory structure to disambiguate file
names; e.g. if you have a file called fieldnotes1.doc in one directory
(“folder”) (for year 2004 research, say) and another also called field-
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