Archive access and accessibility:

a progress report on
social networking at work
David Nathan
Endangered Languages Archive
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Dec 10, 2010

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 School of Oriental and African Studies, U London

Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project

funds

Documentation Program
ELDP Archive Program
ELAR
Academic Program
ELAP
2
 ELDP Funded projects 2003 - 2007

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 The heart of providing and managing access?

ƒ online
ƒ free of cost
ƒ standardised metadata
ƒ single search portal for federated archives
ƒ till now, access has largely been seen as
ƒ online resource discovery via standardised
metadata
ƒ simple identity-driven access control

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 Language documentation

ƒ creation, annotation, preservation, and

dissemination of a representative and multipurpose
record of a language with emphasis on natural
language usage in social contexts

cf Woodbury 2010, Himmelmann 2006

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 Stakeholders in language documentation

documenters documentation projects

language
consultants

What is here?
communities institutions

heritage research
curiosity journos applied

users
 Characteristics of language documentation

ƒ diversity – projects have different goals, methods,

contexts, languages, cultures, communities,
individuals
ƒ protocol – recordings and analysis of language usage
in often sensitive contexts
ƒ more people, more genres, more private
conversations, less researcher knowledge

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 What is a digital EL documentation archive?

ƒ more than a data repository

ƒ fulfilling key needs of endangered languages
stakeholders:
ƒ diversity
ƒ protocol
ƒ a forum/platform for building and conducting of
relationships between data providers and users
ƒ level the playing field between researchers and
community members

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 ELAR - architecture

Archive

request
afd_34

contribute
afd_34 dfa dfadf
dfa dfadf fds fdafds
fds fdafds &
afd_34
dfa dfadf

edit
fds fdafds

afd_34 afd_34
dfa dfadf dfa dfadf
fds fdafds fds fdafds

Providers give access Users

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 ELAR’s access system

ƒ using URCS system

ƒ system matches a resource’s URCS value with the
URCS rights of a given user
ƒ interface always shows resource and user protocol
ƒ URCS applies at deposit, bundle or file level
ƒ depositors can manage access control and levels

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 Protocol / access control

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 Interface: metadata

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 What counts as access?

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 Access to what?

ƒ different stakeholders want different things

ƒ eg descriptivists/typologists want standardised,
technically encoded, linguistic system-markup
ƒ community members may want personally or
culturally relevant items

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 What is access?

ƒ play file(s)?
ƒ download file?
ƒ make content
accessible to user?

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31
32 Eli Timan’s Jews of Iraq website: http://www.jewsofiraq.com/texts/kersijafuf001.xml
33 Speech bubble demo: http://lah.soas.ac.uk/projects/dev/bubble-player/wilbur.html
 Access is also about perceptions

ƒ perceptions of interfaces – like Facebook, ELAR

“reduces distance and power disparities, supports
interactions”
ƒ difficult access mistaken for access control
ƒ personal appearance on website is overwhelming
(NW coastal case)

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 Responses and conclusion

ƒ URCS positively received

ƒ subscription requests - all agreed by depositors
ƒ terms and conditions, onerous but accepted!
ƒ feedback about signup process, too “academic”
ƒ access only for registered users?
ƒ access as access-to-upload, cf Chinese case

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 The next big challenge …

“ The next big challenge facing language

documentation is the discovery and widespread use
of software interfaces that make aesthetically
appealing documentation materials that can be
easily and flexibly used by a wide range of users,
including the speech communities whose
endangered languages we want to document.
- Gerrit Dimmendaal,
”
in Language Documentation and Conservation, v4

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 elar.soas.ac.uk

37 link
 Contact us

ƒ about grants for language documentation

ƒ eldp@soas.ac.uk
ƒ about studying at SOAS or visiting our project
ƒ elap@soas.ac.uk
ƒ about the archive, and depositing
ƒ archive@hrelp.org
ƒ http://elar.soas.ac.uk
ƒ David Nathan
38 ƒ djn@soas.ac.uk
 End

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