Just to begin, some brief reflections from other talks that I've been to.
A lot of the talks have been about digital facilities built around collections of artifacts,
digitised artefacts and so on, but our field, language endangerment, language documentation,
focuses on speakers as people and their social and other circumstances,
the variation between them, change in their language practices over time and so on.
Also, other talks have been about digitisation and metadata creation by institutions,
whereas in our field, typically depositors tend to be very diverse field workers,
working in field situations very diverse, so the previous talk being a great example,
who create born digital materials and are the principal sources of metadata.
Finally, many of our talks quite laudably encourage open access,
but this talk is largely going to be about controlling access,
although I would argue controlling access in order to maximise usage.
Just a brief context, I'm from the Endangered Languages Archive,
which is one of three programs of the Endangered Languages Project
at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
We have three programs there. There's an academic program,
which teaches postgraduate courses in field linguistics and language documentation.
We have a funding body that funds language documentation projects all over the world,
one million UK pounds per year, and has so far funded about 250 projects across the world.
Then finally, the archive, where I'm from, which is predominantly about preserving
and publishing language documentations, many of those coming out of those funded projects,
as well as other activities like training and providing technical services of various kinds.
Just to give you a preview, here is our online presence.
This is the opening page of our archive, so to speak, if you were to visit it.
The various deposits are accessible by map, by search,
leading to deposit home pages, which look like this.
I'd just like to draw out a couple of things.
You might notice we've tried to present this in a genre that is reflecting
the current, especially Web2-type applications with maps and pictures.
We're using faceted browse as well as search.
Notice we expose where it's possible the participants,
so that people could use the participants as a navigational principle
rather than language codes or having to remember the depositor's name,
who might have visited some years ago, and so on.
There's also the access protocol stuff, which I'll describe in more detail.
Our task of preserving and disseminating documentation of languages, why is that important?
Some of you were here for the previous talk and you heard that about half of the world's
approximately 7,000 languages are likely to cease to be spoken within this century.
It might be a startling fact to know that actually we know little or nothing
about most of these languages, and so there's a broad claim then,
an alarming claim that we actually know very little or nothing
about the whole span of human linguistic heritage.
What this means in turn is that in the long term,
if and as those languages do disappear, that the language documentations
and the archives that are preserving and disseminating them will become,
for those wishing to research, to revive, to revitalise languages
or access the knowledge that's encoded in those languages,
will actually depend on our documentations and archives
for that knowledge or transmission of the languages.
I've mentioned language documentation or documentation of languages.
What is that?
Well, very briefly, there's a quote here from one of the initiators
of the subfield of linguistics, Nicholas Himmelman.
It's about the methods, tools, theories,
and of course the practices for compiling a representative record
of a natural language.
So if we unpack that a bit, you can see that the focus is on recording
of naturalistic speech events in a variety of authentic social contexts.
The resources that come out of that should be useful for a variety
not only of academic disciplines but other areas of interest,
such as educationalists and of course community members themselves,
either for language work or other cultural revival areas.
And finally, of course it would be pointless thinking that the languages
are destined to disappear if the very records of those languages are vulnerable,
so it's part of the agenda for language documentation
that the materials be properly preserved, that is archived.
Now, viewed in one way from the point of view of the wellbeing
and the privacy of language speakers, this might not look like a great recipe.
After all, as languages are endangered for various reasons,
we heard about some of them in the previous talk,
military reasons, environmental disasters, socioeconomic pressures,
and so on, political pressures, and as they occur,
the domain where languages are spoken tends to contract and contract
and contract until people are speaking languages in more private domains
and obviously speaking about less public or more private,
more sensitive, more personal matters.
And these are things which are subject then to perhaps making people vulnerable,
where they're speaking about things which might make their government unhappy
or they're speaking about things which might make their neighbours unhappy.
The fact that until recently documentation has been performed by outsiders,
by linguists, and often for the benefit of linguists and others.
Things like the big data movement, where resources tend to be aggregated
and channeled to broader activities of analysis and audiences,
which are probably of little benefit to those individual speakers.
And finally, indeed, the push for open data, which one could then take to mean,
okay, well, let's hear about all your private conversations
and we're going to put them openly out on the internet
so every single person would potentially be able to hear.
Well, that doesn't sound so good, but fortunately,
it's tempered by very strong emphasis on ethical approaches in our field.
I'll say more in a moment.
And of course, the contemporary technological genres that we can use
to help address that situation to which I'll devote the rest of this talk.
Just first on ethical approaches.
Our field, that is language documentation,
has made a great emphasis on ethical approaches,
such as collaborating with language speakers,
collaborating about the goals of projects,
collaborating in the conduct of projects,
making sure that the participants are appropriately rewarded,
whether it's in money-type terms,
or whether it's in outcomes, language outcomes,
or other outcomes in their communities.
And then we have a topic that we at ILAR,
our Endangered Languages Archive, call protocol,
which is the whole issue coming out of the background
I've tried to give you about the inherent sensitivity of materials in our area.
Not all of them, but it's just a basic potential for all materials.
So what we call protocol refers to the collection, the encoding,
and then the implementation and the ongoing management
of the sensitivities associated with particular recordings
and representations of them.
And that's usually implemented, of course,
as access control or access restrictions on the materials.
At ILAR, we have four values or four levels.
This goes from most open to most restricted.
We had originally wanted to actually run these in the other order,
but it doesn't sound very good in English to do so.
So you are resources that are available to all registered users.
C refers to resources which are available, sorry,
R refers to resources available to people who've registered themselves
with a very slight moderation from the archive as researchers.
C are resources available to people who are recognized as community members
of the relevant language community.
And S, which is the more interesting category,
well, S and C really, are resources available to individuals
who have negotiated and then been given individual rights for that resource,
whether it's a file, a bundle of files, or a whole deposit.
So what this means is it takes us from the classic
open archives information system model where you have a kind of linear progression
where digital materials are ingested into the archive
and then various dissemination packages created for the communities
that archive wishes to serve, the archive being the part in the dotted line,
to a model like ours where we place less emphasis on the internals
of the archive if you like, but more emphasis on the producers of materials
being able to have ongoing roles to edit materials
that users would be able to use the archive as a kind of a tunnel
or a platform if you like to request materials,
and then the producers give access and ultimately,
hopefully, although we're not doing this at the moment,
that users would be able to contribute further.
So how does this process work, this implementation of protocol?
Well, here is part of it. Here is a home page again,
and you can see that it's right up there at the interface.
And so imagine someone has come to this particular deposit
and they're interested in some materials.
You probably can't see this, I'm sorry, but this is showing there's 1,206 items
available to any logged in registered user,
and there are two which are subscriber only.
And so if someone proceeded from there and actually went to the subscriber only part,
and you notice here these things have changed color,
what's happening here is the system behind the scenes
is matching the rights of the currently logged in user
with the rights associated with a given resource.
So it's telling the user at any point what you can get and why,
and what you can't get it and why you can't get it,
which people are finding actually to be a quite satisfying approach.
So we have a little bit of very basic metadata here,
but this is showing we, because we have looked for something,
which is subscriber only access, this logged in user is not such a,
doesn't have such access, but he or she is presented with a link,
apply for access, and then if he or she then clicked that,
they would be given a dialogue box and they can give their little blurb
about why they would like to get access.
So I've prepared for you a little trace of some of the activity
that's been going on via that channel.
We launched the archive that you've seen so far about two years ago,
but it's only the last few months that we've fully completed
this subscription tunneling, if you like.
So the archive senior staff also get email records of the activity.
So a lot of the applications are formal things like this.
So someone has just said, please delegate me for access to the material.
And a lot of the responses are formal.
Here's a formal response, and this seems to be addressed as much
to the archive as to the applicant, the user,
although this message would have been delivered to the user,
together with the permission that he or she has asked for.
Some people have just expressed curiosity.
I'm curious to hear what Bislama sounds like.
Some people have gone further, and perhaps more in the spirit
of what we were hoping for here.
So here is someone who has established the credentials
and the reason that they would like to have access from the material.
I'm doing my masters, and I'd like to see a sample of the data.
In this case, unfortunately, the application was rejected,
but notice that we don't have to have an algorithmic-only response.
We can actually have a nice and friendly response from the depositor.
Some responses perhaps could be more helpful.
So in this particular response, the depositor has offered
to answer any further questions.
That's quite nice.
In this case, a different response has offered to meet the applicant
when they're both in the same town.
Here is an application from someone who seems to be a friend of the depositor
and has provided a link, so is starting to share some information
and starting a dialogue perhaps about methods,
methodologies that have been used.
There's a response there which also takes this further,
which is actually the depositor has found some aspects of our ILAR system
which aren't working well for him, so he's provided a little guide
for that requester as to how to navigate the materials.
Finally, in this application, the person has gone a long way
to establish their credentials and perhaps what might be some shared ground
for some future work can actually request an interview.
So you can see there's an opening here perhaps for future collaboration.
So this is all great.
We're very happy with this.
I think what it tells us is that we do face a challenge
which is given this emphasis on protocol, which is a kind of access restriction,
how do we still maximise the usage of the archive?
But I think one of the major things that we can do
and we've been trying to do is to establish and maintain trust.
And we know at least anecdotally that because of the way we've put this archive
both as policy and as implementation right up front that some depositors have come to us
because they have actually been looking for an approach like that
where they can have full trust that the appropriate controls
are going to be placed on the materials.
One obviously needs to build the audiences
and we've been using other social media instruments as well.
And after about two years we've built up a user base of about 700 registered users.
We're very proud that about 15% of those are actually language community members
and that number is increasing.
And speaking of language community members it's worth remembering
given that we're talking about access restrictions, access control
that if for some particular resource perhaps 80% of the people who might ever wish to access it
might be community members.
So establishing a protocol for community members only is hardly closing that resource.
So this is a much more nuanced model we think.
And finally we think it's important to distinguish access from accessibility.
That is it's not just a matter of us serving files that people can or cannot download.
We take very seriously our obligation to make sure that materials are navigable,
understandable and as much as possible usable.
Which is why we have provided interfaces like this.
This one for example here it has also some information in lingua franca Spanish in that case.
And so various kinds of users not only researchers or technical persons could navigate this
or search, search perhaps using a term in the Aramari language here
and come to this video where this lady is describing how to make tortillas.
So we think that so far we have accomplished some things.
We've built an archive which is explicitly for the needs of endangered languages
as we understand them and from our research and from our interactions with various stakeholders.
And in doing so what we say is that we've reconceived the archive as a platform for the establishment
and the conduct of relationships between information providers and information users.
And we think we've also gone some way to leveling the playing field between the traditional researchers
and various other stakeholders especially language community members.
But this leaves some weaknesses or some problems or perhaps further challenges.
We haven't I would say really engaged in thinking or evaluating the effectiveness of the delivery
and the mobilization of the services.
So what's happening at the output end and in particular something that's puzzled me for a while
is about the ongoing participation of language speakers.
Language speakers are typically remaining in our archives as data points, as metadata
which does seem a bit odd in this age of the participatory web
where everybody is communicating and building relationships and so on
and we can start to think well a language is what's happening out there
rather than some files sitting passively in our repository.
So for this challenge of maintaining the agency of speakers
so that the speaker's agency doesn't end the day the field worker leaves the community
or it doesn't end the day that someone has contacted them to ask them about the access conditions in the archive.
What can we do about that?
I think the first step is to think about the voice of the archive.
Now it seems to be the case that in this era where many of us have sort of technologized archives
so that uploading is automatic and then you know archives are populated and people can download things
the voice of the archive itself has kind of been erased.
And I'm quite in favor of the traditional curatorial roles of the archive adding value
for example providing guides, providing comparisons, providing paths through the archive
at least even minimally as a way of being upfront about what is the voice of the archive in this process
in the presentation of these online presences.
Once we get that far we can start to think along the lines of what Mary Lynn has called community curation.
And what this says is that well actually these days it might be very nice
if communities might be able to have something to do with the presentation
or the representation of their materials to others, not merely the archive itself.
And taking that a step further and thinking about a major purpose of the archive as a repository
and a deliver of materials to communities for support of their languages.
There's incredibly diverse languages out there obviously we don't know very much in the archive
about the hundreds of languages we're holding, about the community context, about what people want to do
in terms of delivering that language for language maintenance or revitalization.
So there's a kind of this idea as an inversion of the typical idea where the archivists
are in charge of the presentation of the materials, actually maybe the end users
under this community curation idea would be the ones who know about the context of the materials
and should have some say, some sway over how those processes happen.
Now we haven't done this, this is something we're looking towards in the future.
And then the final point is that I think I've established that we've built something like
at least a meeting place and those messages you saw are evidence of that.
But we actually need for all this to be sustainable, we need a way to reward individuals.
So Jaron Lanier for example has talked about this a great length, we need to reward individuals
and not only what he calls the cloud owners, not pointing my finger at anybody in particular.
And so recently I was thinking about this and I was thinking, well how do individuals get rewarded
and how can there be a kind of marketplace?
And then I realized that although micropayments, people have been talking about micropayments on the web
for a long time, it didn't really work but as soon as the idea of microservices arose,
that is in the mobile context for apps, it's really taken off in such a quick and astounding way
as indeed the web did itself.
So this is a bit of a thought experiment really and again nothing that we've done but I think
sort of tells us a little bit about a possible future path.
Here I've searched here for apps on language learning and I found one on Speak Navajo.
Now I don't really know but let's just say that this Lance Etsiti is a Navajo speaker or educator
and he's got some language materials, well as indeed he has.
These could be more the kind of language documentation materials that we've been talking about earlier.
And he has got his presence there, if you were interested in that you could contact him,
you could pay your euro or so and download the materials, you could ask him to provide more materials
and indeed if you were a linguist you might transcribe or do something else with those materials
and then you're on the level playing field, you could provide those back and perhaps
the community or other people might be interested in that work that you did.
So that's a kind of possible vision for the future.
So to conclude, we know we're in an era of massive digital convergence where,
especially with the digitisation of artefacts, we have a convergence between museums, libraries, archives.
Just as museums are becoming like libraries, actually archives could well become perceived as being like museums.
That may not be something we actually want to be the perception.
So it's important for us to distinguish our goals, the people we serve and the way we want to serve them.
And I hope I've shown you through our implementation of protocol that we've chosen a very specific function
and tried to deal with that.
That's all part of moving from what you could call a resources approach to a participatory one,
hopefully to engage with language speakers in endangered languages communities to support their languages
and to better understand and hopefully combat language endangerment.
And thank you very much.