2 Language Archiving and Language Websites

2.1 Safe keeping and access for your collection

After you’ve collected a number of items–these could be audio recordings, video recordings, photographs, or scans of interesting written materials–you will want to consider how to:

• Keep track of these materials (project data management covered in the next chapter)
• Keep these materials safe in the short term (backing up, making multiple copies)
• Preserve and provide access to these materials (archiving)
• Disseminate the materials (websites, publications, workshops)

In the next chapter, we will consider in detail how you can manage your digital files so that they are named consistently, and so that you have information about the contents of the file such as who is featured, who created the file, when and where the file was created. In this chapter, we invite you to consider how you are keeping your files safe in the short term and how to keep your files safe and accessible in the long term.

Discussion:  Where are your digital files?

Compare notes with your classmates about (1) where your files are stored (2) how many copies there are (3) how often the media are updated (4) cautionary tales about data loss or corruption (e.g., “my hard drive died,” “I lost the pen drive”) (5) success stories of data storage.

To prepare for the next session, we recommend skimming the following resource:

Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project. (2015). Think Before You Appropriate: Things to Know and Questions to Ask in Order to Avoid Misappropriating Indigenous Cultural Heritage. Vancouver, B.C., Canada: Simon Fraser University. Available from https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/resources/teaching-resources/think-before-you-appropriate.

2.2 Websites for Dissemination & Archives for Preservation and Access

Language websites are a useful way of disseminating revitalization material. Websites can be set up relatively easily and edited as needed to highlight new material or new areas of focus. In addition to this, there will be a need for a trusted repository where source and related files can be stored and accessed in the long term. This is where language archives become necessary.

Discussion: Do we need language websites and a collection on a language archive?

We invite you to discuss the difference between websites and archives. You might visit some language archives and some language websites to provide further information for your discussion. We also recommend reading this brief write up by Nick Thieberger comparing websites and archives. Finally, you might use the following points to help with your discussion:

• Free website services offer limited space. For the amount of space needed for the typical documentation project, you will need to buy additional space. Once funding runs out, what will happen to the materials uploaded to the website server?
• You can control the look of and traffic to your website, and include features such as viewer comments and a blog. Language archives must cater to many languages or different types of digital objects. The look of an archive is more standardized than a website, and an individual community or depositor cannot modify that look.
• Once archived, your materials will be accessible to users in the long term.

• Website companies may go out of business, in which case, you may not be able to recover your files easily.
• Language archives are often housed in libraries and universities with stable infrastructure. Files are backed up on a regular cycle and multiple versions are stored in multiple formats.
• Free website companies do not offer guidance for metadata creation.
• Many websites aren’t mobile compatible.
• Some language archives make it easy to stream videos and access other materials easily on mobile devices.
• YouTube is an excellent platform for now, but we cannot be sure of what developments in technology mean for YouTube.
• Commercial websites will increase prices for hosting material and have the ability to implement paywalls.

What we recommend is housing your materials in a DELAMAN archive to ensure long term preservation and access, and supplementing this dissemination through social media, website, and blogs. One is not the substitute for the other. As a language documenter interested in revitalization and related outcomes, you may want to explore multiple methods of disseminating the materials you’ve collected. But, at the core, a archived collection with sustainable long-term preservation and access will allow you and future community members to pursue their goals.

Review discussion:

• Discuss possibilities of data corruption and data loss. Have you experienced this? How can data corruption and data loss be prevented?
• What is the difference between securely storing your collection (hard drive or Dropbox), archiving your collection (for example, in CoRSAL), and disseminating information about your language and culture (as in a website)?

2.3 Ethical and Legal Considerations

Have you considered the wishes of any governing body in the language community? Even if you are a member of the community, you will probably want to share your plans with someone in authority. That consultation will show respect, alert the community to this exciting advancement of resources for the language, and give community voices an opportunity to contribute their opinions. Perhaps they will want to add their own materials as well! Have you considered how you will protect culturally sensitive items, or materials that you are just not ready for the world to see? You can use the access restrictions in the digital library to prevent universal access. Discuss these access restrictions with the CoRSAL archivist. If you are still not comfortable with housing that particular item or set of items in the archive, you may omit them from your deposit. You can also make use of traditional knowledge labels to indicate the cultural significance of an item. We give examples at the end of this section.

Open Access and Fair Use

With DELAMAN archives, you retain the copyright of deposited materials. The archives and the institution that provides the infrastructure for the archive (like a university) will have no rights to commercial use of the materials. So, the archive or university or people working at the university cannot sell the materials to someone else. However, the materials will be freely available to the public for personal and research uses.

The acceptance of open access archives for linguistics is fairly new, and depositors can be hesitant to make material available to the public. For example, there is an understandable concern that sensitive or specialized materials could be inappropriately shared (songs only meant for winter time are shared and sung in the summer) or used for commercial purposes (downloading traditional stories for repackaging and sale). Researchers are worried that materials might be used for a new magnificent analysis. There are safeguards against some of these concerns which we will now discuss.

Suppose that someone takes all the folktales in a collection and makes a children’s book out of them without consulting the community, depositor, or archive. If that children’s book has commercial value and the author makes money off of the book, then that person has gone against the rules of the archive. They are violating copyright rules and can be litigated in court to stop them from selling, or even distributing that book. However, it is unlikely that this will happen, because the items in archive are usually individual sound or video files and are not in a format where they can be easily downloaded and published. Usually, it would just be too much work for that hypothetical copyright violator!

What we are expecting is fair use of the material.

• What is meant by fair use? It means that copyrighted materials can be used for some limited intellectual purposes as per US Code Title 17, Sec. 107:

“[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction, in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”

So the deposited materials can be used for teaching, for example, but not for making money.

Avoiding Cultural Misappropriation

Cultural misappropriation is a term that has become more prevalent in social rights discussions over the past few decades. But what does it mean?

Appropriation is when you take something “that belongs to someone else for one’s own use” (Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project, 2015). Misappropriation is when your use is inappropriate and purely for your own benefit. Culture is not something that can be easily protected under copyright laws, and it is difficult to seek legal aid in battling misappropriation. Cultural misappropriation is when another community’s culture is used without their consent and for reasons that are inappropriate or not beneficial to the community in any way. The following bulleted list, adapted from the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project, 2015, suggests ways to avoid this.

• Prior and informed consent: confirm that you have permission to use cultural aspects in the way you are planning.
• Shared control and collaboration: work together with creators and community members to ensure they have equal control over the use and representation of their culture.
• Proper acknowledgment: ensure that proper acknowledgment is given to the original culture and community.
• Cultural respect: consider the beliefs, values, and practices of the original culture to ensure your use of the culture is in no way at odds.
• Sharing benefit: make sure the benefits of the final use are shared among all parties, including the original creators and cultural community.

We want archive users to respect concerns of misappropriation, and we hope that collection guides and other resources will lead to the appropriate level of respect for culture and language freely shared. Simon Fraser University has a great guide on the issue, from which much of this content is inspired.

You should feel perfectly comfortable discussing issues of access, copyright, and appropriation with the archivist and deciding your comfort level in archiving your materials with the archive.

References

Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project. (2015). Think Before You Appropriate. Things to know and questions to ask in order to avoid misappropriating Indigenous cultural heritage. Simon Fraser University: Vancouver. Retrieved from https://www.sfu.ca/ipinch/sites/default/files/resources/teaching_resources/think_before_you_appropriate_jan_2016.pdf.

Local Contexts. (2017). Background Brief on Local Contexts and the [Traditional Knowledge] TK Labels.  Retrieved from http://localcontexts.mukurtu.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Local-Contexts-Background-Brief.pdf

2.4 Finding an appropriate archive for your collection

To begin this section, read following article and then participate in the discussion:

Kung, Susan Smythe. 2016-08-19. Finding an archive for your (endangered) language research data. Linguistic Society of America, CELP Blog. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/finding-archive-your-endangered-language-research-data

Here are some questions to help with your discussion:

• What should I consider when looking for an archive?
• Will I have control over my materials?
• What aspects will I be able to edit at a later date?
• Can I place access restrictions on items?
• Will I still hold the copyright?
• Will my materials be findable?
• Will archiving cost me money?
• Will my community have to pay to access the materials?
• Will I find assistance in creating metadata?
• Is each item in my collection individually citable?

In much of the literature on archiving, the act of collecting and the resulting archives have been framed as colonial and extractive activities. Here, we invite you to think of your own agency in utilizing new technologies to achieve your goals. This includes deciding what to put in your collection, what to highlight through various dissemination possibilities, and what to make available for improved language description and pedagogy leading to revitalization and scientific discovery. The archive is your tool to reach your goals for your collection and your community.

Linguists working on language documentation or language description projects can think about archiving in the same way–as technology to disseminate source data, a way to provide evidence for analyses, and to invite cross-language investigation. An archived collection itself can lead to publications such as collection guides, and the entire collection and individual items can be cited as digital publications. In addition, a well-organized collection becomes a guide itself for what has been completed and what still needs to be done to.  The archive is a powerful tool in a language documenter’s tool kit.

2.6 Project Activities

Activity 1: Review a CoRSAL Collection

Pick one of the CoRSAL collections and review the features you find–this could include the items in the collection, the metadata, or the interface itself. Write a summary of your findings.

Activity 2: Compare/Contrast Websites vs. Archives

Create an infographic or a presentation comparing and contrasting a website vs. an archive. Discuss why archives are critical for language documentation, and the pros and cons of these methods for sharing your materials.

Activity 3: Ethical Hypotheticals

Consider the different stakeholders in your own language community. What permissions would be necessary to discuss with the various stakeholders? What ethical considerations are necessary? Have there been previous documentation efforts (websites, archival collections)? How were permissions obtained? How have stakeholders responded or made use of that resource?