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Research Methods in Recording Oral Tradition: Choosing Between the Evanescence of the Digital or the Senescence of the Analog

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Research Methods for the Digital Humanities

Abstract

This chapter presents methods for creating proper research data so that it can be archived and re-used in future, with a focus on linguistic fieldwork, but with principles that apply across a range of humanities disciplines. Our research group in Australia set up a project to preserve records in the world’s small languages, this is the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC.org.au). We have paid considerable attention to training new researchers so that they think about the quality of the records they produce, including the content, filenaming, formats, metadata, and equipment they use.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See for example, UNESCO’s page on intangible cultural heritage, https://ich.unesco.org/en/home.

  2. 2.

    Linda Barwick, “Turning It All Upside Down … Imagining a Distributed Digital Audiovisual Archive,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 19, no. 3 (2004): 253–263.

  3. 3.

    http://www.nthieberger.net/sefate.html.

  4. 4.

    https://www.force11.org/group/fairgroup/fairprinciples.

  5. 5.

    Nicholas Thieberger and Andrea Berez, “Linguistic Data Management,” in The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, ed. Nicholas Thieberger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 90–118.

  6. 6.

    Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Terry Cook, and Joan M. Schwartz, “Archives, Records and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance,” Archival Science 2, no. 3–4 (2002): 171–185, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02435620.

  7. 7.

    Linda T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Dunedin: Zed, 1999).

  8. 8.

    For a humorous but nevertheless accurate portrayal of this situation, see this video produced by the TROLLING (https://dataverse.no/dataverse/trolling) archive in Norway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEf0c0NT9.

  9. 9.

    https://creativecommons.org/.

  10. 10.

    Louise Corti et al., Managing and Sharing Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice (London: Sage, 2014), 56.

  11. 11.

    https://www.zooniverse.org/.

  12. 12.

    http://paradisec.org.au/fieldnotes/AC2.htm.

  13. 13.

    http://catalog.paradisec.org.au/collections/AC2.

  14. 14.

    http://bates.org.au.

  15. 15.

    http://dublincore.org.

  16. 16.

    Nicholas Thieberger, A Grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic Language of Vanuatu (Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, No. 33. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006).

  17. 17.

    Also see the UCLA Library’s guide to audio archiving: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/ethno/ethnomuc200.

References

  • Barwick, Linda. “Turning It All Upside Down … Imagining a Distributed Digital Audiovisual Archive.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 19, no. 3 (2004): 253–263.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cook, Terry, and Joan M. Schwartz. “Archives, Records and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science 2, no. 3–4 (2002): 171–185. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02435620.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corti, Louise, Veerle van den Eynden, Libby Bishop, and Matthew Woollard. Managing and Sharing Research Data: A Guide to Good Practice. London: Sage, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Linda T. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thieberger, Nicholas. A Grammar of South Efate: An Oceanic Language of Vanuatu. Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication, No. 33. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thieberger, Nicholas, and Andrea Berez. “Linguistic Data Management.” In The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork, edited by Nicholas Thieberger, 90–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Melbourne and ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Melbourne, Australia

    Nick Thieberger

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  1. Nick Thieberger
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Correspondence to Nick Thieberger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Levenberg Services, Inc., Bloomingburg, NY, USA

    lewis levenberg

  2. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Tai Neilson

  3. The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA

    David Rheams

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Thieberger, N. (2018). Research Methods in Recording Oral Tradition: Choosing Between the Evanescence of the Digital or the Senescence of the Analog. In: levenberg, l., Neilson, T., Rheams, D. (eds) Research Methods for the Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96713-4_13

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