Paul Trilsbeek

Large multimedia archive for world languages

In this paper, we describe the core pillars of a large archive of language material recorded worldwide partly about languages that are highly endangered. The bases for the documentation of these languages are audio/video recordings which are then annotated at several linguistic layers. The digital age completely changed the requirements of long-term preservation and it is discussed how the archive met these new challenges. An extensive solution for data replication has been worked out to guarantee bit-stream preservation. Due to an immediate conversion of the incoming data to standards-based formats and checks at upload time lifecycle management of all 50 Terabyte of data is widely simplified. A suitable metadata framework not only allowing users to describe and discover resources, but also allowing them to organize their resources is enabling the management of this amount of resources very efficiently. Finally, it is the Language Archiving Technology software suite which allows users to create, manipulate, access and enrich all archived resources given that they have access permissions.

Evolving challenges in archiving and data infrastructures

Increasingly often research in the humanities is based on data. This change in attitude and research practice is driven to a large extent by the availability of small and cheap yet high-quality recording equipment (video cameras, audio recorders) as well as advances in information technology (faster networks, larger data storage, larger computation power, suitable software). In some institutes such as the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, already in the 90s a clear trend towards an all-digital domain could be identified, making use of state-of-the-art technology for research purposes. This change of habits was one of the reasons for the Volkswagen Foundation to establish the DoBeS program in 2000 with a clear focus on language documentation based on recordings as primary material. The fact that more and more data is being collected poses some challenges for those who are dealing with this data in one way or another. The researcher who collects the material will need to maintain a coherent administration of all the relevant bits of contextual information surrounding the data. These “metadata” descriptions (see Section 4.2) are not just for the researchers own use but should also allow others to find the data once it has been stored in an archive and should allow others to assess whether the data suits their needs. Research data archives that are storing more and more large data collections will have to provide proper facilities and guidance for potential users of the data to find what they are looking for. While technological advances have made it much easier to collect large amounts of audiovisual recordings, the automatic extraction of the relevant bits of information from these recordings is still very difficult and therefore needs to be done manually to a large extent. This causes a discrepancy be-