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