2011-2016

The infrastructural project 'Digitalt multimediaarkiv för austroasiatiskt immateriellt kulturarv' (Dig-AAA) has drawn to an end and we are pleased to report on a highly successful outcome. Our brief was to create a state-of-the-art digital archive for the long-term preservation of research collections documenting Austroasiatic intangible heritage. Austroasiatic is a family of mostly endangered minority languages spoken in Mainland Southeast Asia and India. The outcome is the 'Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage' (RWAAI), a resource that provides researchers with a new, dynamic research environment that combines both an archiving facility and an interactive workspace in one. This marks a departure both conceptually and methodologically from traditional 'storage-based' archives, where the focus is on lodgement of finished products. RWAAI allows researchers to create workspaces, where data can be shared, transcribed and analysed online with fellow colleagues or language consultants, from anywhere in the world. These workspaces can then be directly uploaded within the same facility as curated archival collections, meeting the current best-standards in archiving practice.

The inspiration for RWAAI arose from the presence at Lund University of the Lund Kammu Collection, a legacy of over 40 years of Austroasiatic research, created by the visionary scholar Kristina Lindell, who with her multidisciplinary team had established Lund as a centre for Austroasiatic research. This unique collection lay languishing in various locations, uncatalogued and inaccessible to future generations of researchers, and the language communities. We were aware of many more Austroasiatic collections around the world in an equally parlous state.

RWAAI was launched publically in March 2013, and the accompanying publicity campaign and conference presentations attracted strong interest from Austroasiatic researchers. The result has been the rescue of research collections containing some of the only recordings in the world of highly endangered, and in some cases now moribund languages and cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia and India. Collected in the pre-digital era, these analog research collections are now safely preserved alongside modern digital research ones. The original audio/visual recordings, transcriptions, translations, illustrations, photographs, maps and field notes are now searchable using state-of-the-art cataloguing, and are available for download. The metadata for all the items archived in RWAAI are harvested by the Virtual Language Observatory and OLAC, search engines dedicated specifically to language resources, that index records for all compliant facilities. RWAAI itself is visible through a dedicated website hosted on the Lund University webpages (www.lu.se/RWAAI) that provides a direct link into the archive. All collections are also linked to relevant pages on languages and societies in Wikipedia.

Our original aim within the project was to populate the archive with a selection of pre-identified collections from 4 of the family's 13 sub-branches, but this modest goal was quickly superseded, especially with the acquisition of some major collections that resulted from our publicity campaign. At the end of the project we have representation in 9 sub-branches, with data from 42 of the 156 Austroasiatic languages--a considerable achievement given that many of the languages and indeed whole sub-branches in the family are still relatively undocumented. Around 1250 hours of audio recordings, and 250 hours of video, were painstakingly digitised in real time by our team's technician.

Thematically, RWAAI's diverse collections document language, anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. A particularly strong and unanticipated interest came from scholars in anthropology and ethnomusicology. The majority of the collections were recorded in situ in Asia, but one major collection on verbal art was recorded in the 1980s in the USA among newly arrived immigrant refugee groups who had fled one of the many conflicts that had stalled Austroasiatic research for much of the twentieth century. Our international depositors include scholars from Europe, the USA, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Japan, as well as language community members.

The synergy we have created between RWAAI and our community of depositors is fostering an exciting new interdisciplinary network of Austroasiatic researchers, who are already beginning to benefit from this resource. The collections continue to grow with deposits from current scholars working with digitally-born materials under curation, as well as contributions from staff and student researchers locally at Lund University. The archive is also being used by students at the university and has provided primary resources for BA and MA papers.

Our innovative approach in applying modern language documentation techniques to legacy materials had not been pursued systematically by other archives. Therefore, considerable energy was spent in devising new workflows and addressing the very unique technical issues that arose. Tools specific to legacy materials were developed to automate metadata processing, autocorrect orthographic inconsistencies, and integrate multimedia resources. The Lund Kammu Collection provided the test ground. One of the tools developed was the Automated Tone Restoration tool for Kammu. Over the course of 40 years, orthographic conventions within the project changed, so there was variable consistency across the materials. The tool was developed in response to this, maximising the reusability of the collection as a searchable resource.

Importantly, the project brought together a new and dynamic team comprised of existing and new staff sourced both locally and abroad. This has nurtured unique expertise in digital archive technologies and the highly specialized recovery and digitization of analog media, and enriched the expertise both in the department, and beyond. This has placed our team and the RWAAI facility at the forefront in this aspect of the digital humanities and language documentation in northern Europe. RWAAI's role is recognized as a full member of The Digital Endangered Languages and Music Archive Network (DELAMAN http://www.delaman.org).

During the course of the project, public relations efforts aimed specifically at potential depositors were supported through promotion and networking at conferences and workshops dedicated to Southeast Asian linguistics at Leipzig SEA workshop (November-December 2012) and SEALS XXIII in Bangkok (May 2013), to anthropologists at CHAGS, Liverpool (June 2013) and in a special panel to raise awareness of these resources at CHAGS, Vienna (September 2015), and to computational linguists at NODALIDA 2013, Oslo (May 2013). Recently, the project was also the subject of reports in LUM, the Lund University Magazine, and in the public press in the local newspaper Sydsvenskan.

The project generated a range of activities at Lund University. Distinguished guest depositors have given departmental seminars, and attended workshops and roundtables, and our team have given presentations on our facility to the Humanities Lab and Linguistics department, and participated at special sessions on the Digital Humanities. Staff members have also been active in meetings nationally, for example with SWE-CLARIN, the newly-established national arm of the pan-European Clarin initiative, and the Swedish National Dataservice. The project has been the main user and developer of the corpus server facility of the Humanities Lab, and one of our team members is employing the new expertise gained in our project as the Humanities Lab's Corpus Server Manager. We have also engaged in knowledge-transfer activities, including training in archiving and data management methodology with members of the ERC-funded LACOLA (www.lu.se/lacola) and Wallenberg-funded LUNDIC (http://project2.sol.lu.se/lundic/index.html) research projects who are now taking advantage of the corpus server.

This project has allowed us to revitalise Lund U's position as a leader in Austroasiatic research, and successfully turn it into a world-class center for modern language documentation in northern Europe. We have developed an exemplary resource technically on a par with leading international archives such as The Language Archive (MPI Nijmegen), and the Endangered Languages Archive (School of Oriental and African Studies, U. London). It has also positioned us at the cutting-edge in the application of modern language documentation techniques to legacy materials. This has given members of our team, including student assistants, the opportunity to develop unique expertise in the area of digital archiving and language documentation, which not least is of benefit to the regeneration of language research locally.

Publications

Burenhult, N. (submitted). Domain-driven documentation: the case of landscape. Language Documentation and Conservation.
 
Uneson, M. (2013). Tone restoration in transcribed Kammu: decision-list word sense disambiguation for an unwritten language. In Oepen, S., Hagen, K. & Bondi Johannessen, J. (eds.) Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings, 399-410, 85.
 
 
Presentations:
 
Burenhult, N. (2015). Mapping categories of the past and present for the future. Invited presentation in the session Imaging the Past: Using New Information Technologies To Nurture Historical Analysis, Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), San José, February 2015.

Burenhult, N., Kruspe, N., Larsson, J., Uneson, M. (2014). Digital Multimedia Corpora. Presentation at the Digital Tools in the Humanities seminar series, Lund University.

Burenhult, N. (2013). Domain-driven documentation: the case of landscape. Invited presentation at the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC) 3 special lecture series on interdisciplinary aspects of language documentation, funded by the National Science Foundation, University of Hawaii.

Burenhult, N. (2013). Mapping indigenous landscape categories: the case of Jahai (Austroasiatic, Malay Peninsula). Keynote at the workshop Landscape Through the Prism of Language, University of Zurich.
 
Kruspe, N. (2013). Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage. Southeast Asian Linguistics Society annual conference, Bangkok, Thailand.


Conference panel sessions:

Kruspe N., & Burenhult , N. (2015). Multimedia Resources for Hunter-Gatherer Research. 11th Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies, September 2015, Vienna.
 
 
Workshops:

Kruspe, N. (2013). Invited ELAN Workshop, Uppsala University.

Kruspe, N. (2013). Invited ELAN workshop, Lund University.