Dear friends,

Greetings!

I am here to introduce to you our audiovisual documentation project.

Africa is proud of 2000+ indigenous languages. Most African languages disappear as their speakers die out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_death or shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_shift to speaking other languages. To mitigate the risk effect of language loss due to mentioned instances, and with support from the Wikimedia Foundation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia_Foundation, the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria (WUGN) had conceptualized the idea of audiovisual documentation of indigenous languages for enriching the Wikimedia projects.

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 and education and research purposes.

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

The team has successfully executed the first phase of the audiovisual documentation of indigenous languages in Nigeria. See the result here https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Language_Oral_History_Documentation_Project.%20The%20team%20is%20currently%20working%20on%20the%20second%20phase%20of%20the%20project. Currently, the team is finalizing the 2nd phase of the project.

We observed that the requisite skills needed to execute a similar project are limited in the movement. Hence, the idea is to recruit and introduce volunteers to the basic skills required to replicate a similar project in other African countries.

Volunteers would learn about the followings:

1. Interfacing with experienced Cinematographers on how to produce high-quality audiovisual content. 2. How to build elicitation protocol for an interview subject. 3. How to create comprehensive metadata for an audiovisual. 4. Knowledge about archival activities that are involved in language audiovisual documentation. 5. How to identify an endangered language and proposal writing techniques for an audiovisual project. 6. How to analyze a language knowledge gap. 7. How to create awareness for content on the internet. e.g. social media. (product sharing) 8. How to manage copyright licenses on the material used for audiovisual documentation 9. How to determine various Wikipedia articles where the languages can be used ( Language counts)

Are you interested?

Please fill out the attached Google form by the 10th of July 2022.

https://forms.gle/9wx9hsJhoMP13wHM9

Project manager

Olushola Olaniyan