IASA 2019 Annual Conference

Around the turn of the 21st century, as numerous digital language archives dedicated to the documentation of endangered languages were established, best practices for the creation and archiving of audio recordings, annotation, and metadata were established and widely accepted (see for example the Open Language Archive Community; http://www.language-archives.org/). At that time, some initial best practice recommendations for video recording were also established, but the use of video for documenting spoken language was still considered to be beyond the reach of all but the most well-funded documentary projects, and few documentary linguistics worked with the medium and even fewer understood the best practices in place. However, over the last decade, there has been a sharp increase in the use of video in language documentation projects, but there are still no widely accepted best practices in the field, neither by archivists who curate endangered language archives nor by the documenters who are producing and processing the video files for archives. This paper presents some of the challenges documentary linguists and endangered language archives face in adopting appropriate video file formats, such as the limited resources for storing and processing large, high-quality video files (e.g., JPEG 2000), and provides some recommendations for establishing best practices for the use of video in the field of documentary linguistics.