Knowledge Transfer Initiative (KTI)/Programs

Audiovisual documentation

This session of the initiative will focus on audiovisual documentation as an offshoot of Nigerian language audiovisual documentation.

We use audio-visual documentation methods (photography and film-documentary techniques) to record, capture and archive the different facets of lives and user stories by ordinary people.

Africa is proud of 2000+ indigenous languages. The majority of the languages are disappearing as their speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. To mitigate the effect of language loss due to mentioned instances, and with support from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria (WUGN) had conceptualized the idea of audiovisual documentation of indigenous languages for enriching the Wikimedia projects.

behind the scene

The Nigeria audiovisual language is a project designed to produce high-quality audiovisual content on indigenous languages in Nigeria and make it available for use on Wikipedia for education and research purposes.

The team has successfully executed the first phase of the audiovisual documentation of indigenous languages in Nigeria. See the result here.

We observed that the requisite skills needed in the execution of a similar project are limited in the movement, and hence, the idea to recruit and introduce volunteers to learn the basic skills required replicating a similar project in Africa.

Volunteers would learn about the followings:

• Interface with experienced Cinematographers on how to produce high-quality audiovisual content.
• How to build elicitation protocol for an interview subject.
• Video subtitle techniques
• Likely archival activities involved in language documentation.
• How to identify an endangered language and proposal writing.
• How to analyze the language knowledge gap.
• How to make the content available on the internet. e.g. social media. (Knowledge sharing)
• Understanding the related copyright implications around some of the materials used in the documentation.
• How to determine various Wikipedia articles where the languages can be used ( Language counts)
• How to identify language Partnership ( content and institutional partners)