seeking Native digital archivist

[Mia Kalish (LFP)]

This is good to know. I was thinking on my way home last night that no one
has done a project on the scale that I imagine Mona Smith's project to be.

Commercial applications in general try to regularize and reduce the size of
information by using text, as for example email and banking and sales
transactions.

Obviously, despite the popularity of video, there has been little
introduction into teaching and presentation, evidenced by the fact that we
don't have any really good interfaces for video in the popular projects.
People still seem to expect that those using video will just put the
CD/DVD/tape into the appropriate machine and that is that.

We have several academic production studios here on campus, but no one deals
with the issues of moving video across the web. I am pretty sure we write
double-layer commercial DVD's; I have stuff that I have ripped and copied,
because I am working on Mining for Science prototypes where people are
encouraged to find examples of science, technology, engineering and
mathematics in such materials as Robert Mirabal's Music from a Painted Cave,
Boston's Big Dig, and the 2005 Rose Bowl Parade. For me, being able to
create what we now call a "bookmark" directly in a location in the video to
highlight a particular observable STEM example would be extremely useful.
This is, however, difficult to do without destroying the overall see-ability
of the video clip.

There is a rumor about computer science that in a relatively short period of
time, we won't be using even the optical storage any more. Instead, we will
be using massively storable devices like very large capacity memory sticks.

I was wondering, did you use any compression? For things like the Mirabal,
with its incredible effects, compression is truly awful. I was wondering how
it is for the types of recordings that you have?

I tried to go to your link. I got to the University, and there was a
research subdirectory, but there was no linguistics subdirectory. I poked
about a little, but couldn't find the linguistics research.

I've always wanted to go to Australia. There and to Alaska. Sigh.

Mia


-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Felicity Helen Meakins
Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 1:05 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] seeking Native digital archivist

> Why don't you simply use a digital video camera, and then save on DVD? DVD
> is about the best stuff there is, and if you get good quality stuff, your
> recordings will be as safe as they can be.

I am involved in the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project in
Australia, and we have stacks of video that needs archiving. We have been
agonising over this stuff for quite a while. DVD was one option we
explored and decided against it. You can store only about 4.7GB on DVD (20
min of uncompressed footage is about 8GB), and the burnable DVDs are only
one layer (unlike commercial ones which are two layer). As I understand
it, this means they have a very short life span. We are archiving on hard
disks and servers as a result. It's not cheap but there's not much option.
We use Quicktime and Final Cut Pro to 'digitise' the DV tapes.

Felicity

www.unimelb.edu.au/linguistics/research/projects/acla/index.html