CRASSH

Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures

Conference review 

This practical workshop brought university-based researchers in anthropology, geography and linguistics into conversation with representatives from international organisations that aggregate and disseminate large holdings of ethnographic and linguistic data. Through brief presentations and extended discussions, participants explored innovative ways of visualising cultural and linguistic diversity and shared techniques and tools for representing endangerment, both cartographically and geospatially.

Presentations were clustered into thematic panels that addressed representations of traditional knowledge in digital domains; online anthropology and digital collections; geospatial tools and community activism; speech atlases and language maps from institutional and community perspectives; and visualisation tools used by language archives. Alongside scholars representing leading research programmes in these fields, we were joined by colleagues from UNESCO, Ethnologue, Arcadia Trust, Alexander Street Press and Endangered Alphabets.

Aims: To bring together university-based researchers in anthropology, geography and linguistics with representatives of ethnographic and linguistic international organisations. To explore innovative ways of visualising cultural and linguistic diversity. To encourage participants to share techniques and tools for representing cultural endangerment, both cartographically and geospatially.

Outline of intellectual content: Seven panels, seventeen presenters, and two extended discussion sessions. Topics included the role of arts organisations in mapping scripts and visual culture; examples of digital anthropology collections; the role of geospatial tools and community activism in fieldwork and dissemination of materials; institutional interventions in creating speech atlases and languages maps; the role of researchers and communities in mapping language diversity; and sustainable solutions for mapping cultural archives. 

Key points raised:

Several main points that were highlighted in the workshop:

1. The role that open access digital platforms play in efficiently sharing cultural materials; and how they can be operated ethically by using guidelines for intellectual property rights
2. The use of geospatial tools in fieldwork and how these can improve the accuracy of mapping content to geographical spaces
3. The importance of collaboration between fieldworkers and institutions in creating accurate records of cultures and languages
4. The need for funding for collaborative projects that bring scholars, community members, artists and technical specialists together to efficiently archive and disseminate endangered cultural materials
5. The relevance to source communities of geospatial tools for understanding culture, and of digital access to their own materials

We have received the following feedback from workshop participants (all anonymous):

“I thought it was one of the best workshops I have been to in the last twenty years of my academic life in Cambridge: excellently organized with plenty of time for discussion, fascinating speakers, a tremendous atmosphere of collaboration, a feeling that things are on the very [brink] of a great change. It was a privilege to be present and I learnt an enormous amount. Thanks so much for organizing.”

“I just have a few things to say, apart from how inspiring the conference was, in such good atmosphere, and so well organized with an excellent infrastructure and good (and working!) technical equipment.  What I liked is that it [was] all plenary presentations, no problems of not being able to choose from parallel sessions! The number of participants was also not too large, so that we were able to speak to everyone we wanted. I would very much like to have a list of all the wonderful website that were shown, with a short description of what it is. It is so time-consuming to find out yourself what is what and what it is for and for whom. You can’t see that immediately from the name of the address or from the first page of the site. I felt that most presentations were about work that we are doing for each other, and not so much for the speech communities from whom we collect our data. I would have loved to share experiences with other fieldworkers.”

“As I said, it was a pleasure – and a comprehensive stock-taking exercise, and an excellent opportunity to foment cooperations. I have already been exchanging with some of the participants about cross-linking our databases…”

Plans for follow-up events or publications: As the main World Oral Literature Project event is an annual occurrence, we plan to hold a similar workshop-style conference next year. The theme will depend on emerging collaborations and interests from this year’s workshop. We plan to host audio recordings and powerpoint presentations from this year’s workshop on our World Oral Literature Project website so they can be used for training and wider dissemination. Presentations will be linked from this webpage.

Presenters at the workshop have been invited to contribute papers to the peer-reviewed journal Book2.0 for a special edition on the rapidly growing application of digital tools to research and publishing strategies in the humanities and social sciences. Publication is scheduled for 2013; the online journal can be found here.

Participants at the workshop have additionally broadcast posts on their own or institutional blog sites about workshop themes and resultant collaborations.

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