the head of the language archive in Paul Trilsbeck.
He is the chef, the part of the archive,
proper of the language archive aren't here,
but I can present them and answer questions
if they are pertinent even in their domain, I guess, I hope.
So I'm myself a linguist and a field worker,
so I used to be a worker in the Dolbus project,
the documentation of Endangered Language Project.
And I think there are now visible interfaces
with digital humanities, which is why I proposed this talk
for this conference.
So I will give a very short introduction and background
why language documentation,
present language documentation itself,
present the Dolbus program,
present the language archive,
and then I will sum up with some notes on relations
or digital humanities, although I will do so
throughout the talk.
So if the time doesn't allow,
I think most of the points will be mentioned
during the talk anyway.
So language diversity.
This here is a map which shows one red dot
for the center of each of the world's languages.
There are around 6,000 dots in this map or 7,000.
It depends on how you count.
That's a difficult issue if you count dialects or not
on how to do that.
But anyway, there is a huge diversity of languages.
While digital humanities usually are concerned
with one of the major 10, 20, perhaps 30 languages,
most others are usually not covered by part of beach taggers
or automatic translation systems and so on.
But this diversity this year is for South America,
which is the continent where I work.
Each color represents a language family
or a branch of a language family.
This wonderful colored diversity,
which is similar in other regions of the world,
is indeed going away.
This on the left is a map of the diversity
found around 1,500, around the contact with the white world.
And the right map is a map of the current situation
where you can see really easily
where the European influence has been more severe
and more prolonged for the over the centuries.
So in the West, in the more recent discovered
or explored regions, you still find some
or several languages, but on the Eastern part,
especially in Brazil, you don't find
so many languages anymore.
And this is not just the case in South America.
This holds for the whole world wherever you go.
Many, many languages are going away.
The UNESCO has an online atlas
of the world's languages in danger
where they apply several criteria
to measure the endangerment of languages.
And as it turns out, more than the half,
perhaps even 90% of languages aren't least vulnerable.
That means they are in a situation of cultural,
sociological, political, economical changes
that can make these languages disappear
in the coming three, four or five generations.
But many, many languages are already in a situation
where only elderly people speak them
and they are not passed anymore to the younger generation,
which means that their disappearance
is just a matter of time.
That is the language map for Brazil
where you'll see that most of the around 150, 170 languages
in Brazil have at least a white
and many have even a red spot in this system of measurement.
So language documentation is one possible answer
to this dramatic situation where we are about to lose
a high percentage, maybe even 80, 90%
of the language diversity which is out there
in the coming 100, 150 years.
It has been established as a subfield of linguistics
in the last 10, 12, 14 years.
Nicolas Zimmerman wrote a seminal paper in 1998
where he makes a distinction between language description
and language documentation and I think this is
the starting point of language documentation
as a new academic discipline.
It has been triggered by language endangerment
but it has especially been enabled
by the technical revolution, the digital revolutions,
the new possibilities that we have
to gather new language material.
So in addition to what was formally usual
to do about a language, you go there
and you make a description.
You produce a grammar, you produce a dictionary
and maybe you produce a text collection.
Nowadays, you produce a corpus of multimedia data
and annotate this corpus and this is the new contribution
that language documentation has to offer.
That means that you focus not just on examples
taken out of texts or elicited samples
of a language, elicited sentences,
but that you are able to observe language
in its natural conditions with a cultural background
around it.
So those corpora that we produce, they are multipurpose
because often they are the only record
that will be available of a given language
and culture in a couple of generations.
So it's not just linguists who are interested
in such corpora, although of course they are one
of the first target groups, especially typologists
are interested in comparing languages
and find out about all the possible language structures
and compare them and find out about universals.
But also anthropologists, ethnomusicologists
and so on and so on are really interested
in such material, but it goes on.
So many other sciences, biologists, archaeologists
are interested in getting records or knowledge
about rare, small cultures.
And last but not least, such materials are also very useful
for revitalization efforts.
So all these different purposes have to be covered
by such corpora of annotated multimedia data.
The most crucial point here is that we really don't know
what in 50 years the possibilities will be.
Technical possibilities, but also intellectual possibilities.
What are people going to do with this material?
And that means we can't foresee that, but we can try
to produce corpora which have a very broad coverage
which try to cover very many different genres of speech.
So that in future other sciences can use this material.
There are many initiatives that foster
language documentation, documentation of endangered languages
by the Volkswagen Foundation is one of the first,
I guess it was, the email program in the US contributed
theoretical and methodological knowledge.
And then regional archives appeared.
So here in for Alaska, the Latin American archive
of language material, Para Disec, Ayatzes.
Then one of the biggest programs which is still active
is the Endangered Language Project at the SOWAS in London.
L'Acito in France was active quite early.
And in the US there is the documenting
and endangered languages program
where also funds are available.
And these are the local or regional
or even global initiatives for documenting
endangered languages in this new sense
of creating archives of language material.
And they are embedded in, or they have links
to international initiative that try to together
and join these different individual initiatives.
So for instance, the L'Ac open language archive
initiative has defined a metadata standard
that makes all this different material available
in one searchable platform.
There is a network of different
endangered languages in music archives.
Clarine in Europe has a similar function
to getting together different archives
with different language resources,
not just for endangered languages,
but for the humanities in general.
UDAT is an even wider context where data gets integrated
and endangered language data plays a role here
as in maybe perhaps especially tricky sample, tricky case.
DASISH is an infrastructure that aims at integrating
the different digital humanity data initiatives in turn
and so on.
So this is a growing network of networks
and digital humanities are here on the right hand
and they get input from the endangered language archives
and data.
It is an established field also because it has
by now in the language documentation, a handbook.
It has two major journals and it has additionally
two larger online sources of information
where you can learn about a language documentation,
the methods and can ask questions and get information
on how to do it and where to go and what to do.
The basic idea of language documentation
is that you start with recordings, audio recordings,
video recordings that depict the natural situation
of language utterances.
And in the next step, this is primary data.
This is the data that we all start with.
As a next step, you annotate this audio and video recordings
and I think the minimum for annotation
is to give a transcription, perhaps orthographical,
perhaps phonetic, phonological, what have you.
Then a translation, that might be a word by word translation
or an idiomatic translation or other kinds
of intermediate forms and you can have many other layers
of linguistic annotation, part of speech tagging
or morph by morph translations or syntactic structure
or phonetic intonation curves or whatever.
This is secondary or derived data
and this all has to be described and made findable
by metadata which joins these different resources
into what we call a session.
So this year is the DOBUS terminology
but I think many other initiatives have a similar concept
of bundling resources into something
which can be searched together
although there might be different files on the hard disk.
For the annotation part, one tool has been developed
in the DOBUS context which is the alarm tool
where you can see the very different tiers
and you can have all sort of linguistic annotation
and here we start to get into the world of diversity.
Diversity is one of the key words of this congress
and it is not just that languages are very diverse
and you have to cover a very diverse object
but also the way to approach it,
the way to cover and to describe
and to annotate this data might also be very, very diverse
and indeed we find in language archives
very diverse data types.
Many have something like morph theme
by morph theme translation
but when it comes to the different glosses
and the grammatical categories
and the terminology applied
then variation starts from project to project
and sometimes even from person to person
or within a single document you might have incoherence
but also the additional levels,
you can have many, many different ways of doing it
so more recently you have annotations of gestures
or of facial expressions or of other issues
which might be very relevant for the cultural context
and the way of communication
which is not, which we didn't use to be part of the core
of linguistic descriptions 10 or 15 years ago.
This here is very time consuming
if you have to do it by hand
but that is indeed what is done so far.
So one of the things where digital humanities come in
is to help the language endangerment
and language documentation community
to lower the threshold for annotating the switch material
by for instance providing automatic mechanisms
that can split up words into morphs
even if the language is not known
and if the corpus is really small, right?
It is easy to do that for a very richly documented language
but for a language where we have just some tens
of thousands of words, that is a tricky task
and to give part of speech or syntactic structure analysis
for such languages, this is something where digital humanities
really has to come into endangered languages research.
If you have such corpora, then you can organize them.
This here is the IMDI way of organizing such sessions
which are here the green bundles
with the associated resources
and on the right hand side, you have the description,
the metadata descriptions part of it, this goes on and on.
IMDI is a very complete and extensive metadata set.
There are other models which have only doubly core
or a little bit more like an OLAC.
Once you have your data in that form,
you can show and display the data for the users online
like here in the annex interface
where you can see the speakers and see the annotation.
Which annotation you get depends on the project
which did the annotation by hand anyway.
So, DOBIS is one of these programs.
It is an initiative by the Volkswagen Foundation
together with German linguists.
It is a program with a self-organizing structure.
So there are many different individual research teams
which have a steering body.
The heart of this whole enterprise
was and is a technical center, a technical project
at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen
and this is what now is called the language archives.
It's developed into this new unit.
Each project runs two to four years
but the community is still together so every year
even the old projects come together
and we just had two weeks ago our last DOBIS meeting
with more than 80 or 90 participants I guess.
So, the history of DOBIS is rather ancient, right?
Ancient in terms of language documentation.
There was the first call for the language endangerment
was in the early 90s and already in 1993
Volkswagen Foundation helped to produce,
to make a summer school about this issue
and then in 1999 came the first call
and in 2000 the first individual DOBIS project starts
and since then there have been between
five and 10 new projects every year.
This year is very parallel
to the technological development, right?
Only in 2000, 2001 we had digital storage capacity
to tape large amounts of audio and video data
and to process them, right?
This would have been impossible
in the early or even mid 1990s, right?
So, by now there has been some 70 individual projects
about some 90 target languages.
This year is a map showing the diversity
of DOBIS project all over the world.
What has been achieved?
I think language documentation is established.
We know what it is about.
It is about producing digital archives
as primary data and annotation
and we know more or less how to do it.
In the DOBIS context much of the relevant software
has been produced and is being developed.
We have thought about the legal and ethical questions
and now several national and regional archives
using the DOBIS technology,
the language archiving technology are being implemented.
Okay, and generally language diversity
and the endangerment of it is a general topic
not 10 years ago, right?
So, very briefly about the language archives.
This is the new unit as the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics.
It is headed by Wolfgang Klein and Peter Wittenberg.
It is a joint venture of the Max Planck Society,
of the Max Planck Institute itself,
of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science
and of the Dutch Academy of Science.
They all found two fixed position or three.
The goal is thus to come out of just project funding
but to give this archive a more permanent basis,
not just for the archive, the data itself
but also for the software development in context with it.
This center is one of the backbones centers of Clarine
and other initiatives and it participates,
the group participates in many other
former and ongoing projects.
Many of them are relevant
for the digital humanities in general.
We've got some 60 terabyte of very different resources,
linguistic field research resources
but also other resources.
Two 20,000 hours of audio and video recordings
organized in such sessions, 50 lexica.
The dopest part of it is just one small part.
So, we are receiving new corpora of people
who have field work data in their drawers and cupboards.
They can come and we digitize the material
and archive it together with them.
They need to provide the metadata.
So, we have this tool development
which supports the whole life cycle for the data
from the production preparation,
annotation, the integration into corpora, the organization
and then the dissemination online via web services
like annex which I showed before.
We are switching over to a new metadata component
which is developed in the Clarine context
and which is relevant for the whole digital humanities.
We developed the RBL editor for this metadata format
and we are starting to invest in audio
and video recognizers which also lower the amount of time
needed to find the spots where is spoken,
who is speaking, which gesture occurs in which position.
So, summing up, language documentation
and the digital humanities are very much about diversity,
diversity of languages, diversity of data formats
but also diversity of approaches, how to annotate,
how to treat, how to analyze this rich material.
I think that the DOBOS program in particular
but endangered languages archive in general
have contributed quite early that the digital humanities
started to think about sustainability,
that data is not anything or not something
that you have to create for a short term research purpose
but that data has a value in itself
and need to be preserved for future generations
to be checked that research can be made accountable
so that later people can come and prove your results.
So, in linguistics, in the grammar,
you can now click on an example sentence
and you can see, okay, this is in fact spoken
that in that way.
It's not just the grammarian who writes it down
in his or her grammar.
Interdisciplinary and teamwork is something
which is very important to the digital humanities
and is something which has been practiced
in language documentation from the very beginning
and I think this is also one of the interfaces
between language documentation and digital humanities.
The building of global networks,
not just of archives and of metadata
but also of cooperation, of annotation schemes
and of research goals is something which also is common
between digital humanities and language documentation.
Thinking about open access but on the other hand,
thinking about privacy rights
and intellectual property rights
is something which has been done early
in language documentation.
And the need for mobilization,
the exploitation of the language data
but of data in general and here for digital humanities,
I think these corpora are now something
which is there, out there for being accessed,
for being used, for tools to be played on,
proved on to expand on a lot of knowledge
and technology in the digital humanities
using the endangered language corpora as a test case.
So, as I said, I'm really waiting
and anxious to see digital humanity methods,
natural language processing methods,
computational linguistics methods
but other also for imaging, image analysis
and so for reducing annotation time and costs.
Thank you very much.
Okay.