378
David Nathan
Another challenge comes from an increasing preference for open source
software and open data formats.
13
While most current fully-featured multi-
media authoring and presentation tools are proprietary products with closed
data formats,
14
the effort expended in developing content far exceeds the
cost of even the most expensive of them. Without these well-developed
authoring tools, the development of applications for a community would
consume more, not less, resources.
15
Again, decisions have to be made on
the basis of priorities for providing particular kinds of products and lan-
guage support.
Multimedia is a new and complex technology and choosing to use it for
mobilization will also involve making trade-offs between its positive con-
tributions to language communities and its less-than-optimal suitability for
archiving, repurposing, and even distribution. Many multimedia resources
are not readily archived and have limited longevity. These limitations can
be due to closed formats, but are, more broadly, an inevitable result of de-
ciding to develop multimedia rather than other types of resources. Multi-
media involves integrating a variety of media and file formats, and the use
of any digital media in language documentation is vulnerable to the insta-
bility of a variety of formats, even open-standard ones. In addition, there
are no settled conventions for designing and describing interfaces, and it is
not fully known how to neutrally represent and archive abstract content
such as navigation, layout, links, and interactivity. These various challenges
mean that one works with multimedia not as a general strategy for satisfy-
ing diverse needs such as long-term data preservation, but in recognition of
its potential for mobilizing documentation and strengthening languages,
right now, when it is most needed.
Chapter 15 – Thick interfaces: Mobilizing language documentation
379
Notes
1.
In this chapter, I use “sound” to include both sound and video.
2.
The term has since become more widely used (e.g. Wittenburg, Brugman et al.
2004; Austin 2004). It is related to, but greatly extends, the sense of “exploita-
tion” used by Wittenburg, Brugman et al. (2004) to refer to using software to
browse and analyze archive data. “Mobilization” is a more tasteful way of de-
scribing such activities in English, but does not offer that advantage in German.
3.
They were adapted from Deborah Cameron, cited in Grinevald (2003).
4.
In reality, there is still a wide gap between many elements of Woodbury’s
reconceptualization and the ways that linguists generally work with materials.
5.
The term can be understood as referring to the previous constraints (rather than
its actual capabilities) in the same way that horseless carriage and wireless
named new technologies in terms of reversals of their predecessors (cf. Mc-
Luhan 1964).
6.
Recently the meaning of “metadata” has been narrowed to refer to data that is
not deemed to be “in” the linguistic event (e.g. the location or gender of the
speaker) and used as file cataloguing data primarily for the purpose of resource
discovery. Such metadata can be classified in terms of its various roles, e.g. in
cataloguing, managing, or preserving the data (see Chapter 4).
7.
Online at www.unizh.ch/spw/afrling/akandic/samples.htm; viewed September
2003.
8.
Interface design is also known as Human Computer Interaction or User Expe-
rience Design.
9.
Paakantyi is the language of the lower Darling River, NSW, Australia.
10. Or worse, an outsider’s fantasized version of the culture.
11. The talking dictionary is described in more detail in Nathan (2006).
12. Karaim is an endangered Turkic language spoken in Trakai, Lithuania, and in
Halich, Ukraine.
13. Bird and Simons (2003: 22) go as far as to advocate “an open source revolu-
tion.”
14. All the examples discussed in this chapter were authored using Macromedia
Director (www.macromedia.com).
15. It is possible that open-source authoring tools may become available, e.g.
based on SMIL, but it is not clear when such tools may appear and how much
authoring capability they might offer.
Abbreviations and resources
Up-dated versions of the following lists may be found at the book’s website
at http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ld
.
Abbreviations, acronyms and technical terms in alphabetical order
N.B. For the sake of easy reference, this list comprises all abbreviations and
acronyms used in this book in alphabetical order so that readers need not
know in advance whether a given abbreviation stands for a technical term
or concept, an organization, or some other kind of resource.
AAA
American Anthropological Association (http://www.aaanet.org)
AIATSIS
Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies (http://www.aiatsis.gov.au)
AIFF
Audio Interchange File Format (Apple audio format)
AILLA
Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America
(http://www.ailla.utexas.org/site/welcome.html)
ANNEX Annotation
Exploration
tool (http://www.mpi.nl/ANNEX)
ANSI
American National Standards Institute (http://www.ansi.org)
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange
(7-bit standard)
ATRAC Adaptive
Transform
Acoustic
Coding (Format
for
MiniDisc
audio
recordings; http://www.sony.net/Products/ATRAC3/tech/atrac3/
index.html)
AUTOTYP
AUTOmatic TYPologizing (Research program in linguistic
typology; http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp)
AVI
Audio Visual Interleave (Digital video format;
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;316992
#XSLTH3123121122120121120120)
Big5
(Encoding format for traditional Chinese characters, developed
by five big Taiwanese companies; http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/
Projects/Chinese/info_it.htm)
BWF Broadcast
WAV File (Digital audio format incl. time stamping;
www.ebu.ch/departments/technical/trev/trev_274-chalmers.pdf)
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