Culture documentation as linguistic stimulus

Abstract

known that various 'traditional' or locally-based cultural and economic practices are declining or changing rapidly. This paper will show how well-filmed short videos of endangered cultural practices can be used for eliciting procedural/cultural narratives as linguistic data, as well as providing visually appealing material for ethnography, culture documentation, and cultural/eco tourism. By recording narrations as a separate soundtrack (cued by the visual stimulus) researchers are able to collect explanations by different speakers representing different age groups, genders, dialects, or in different languages from different regions or even different countries. Taking traditional usage of the sugar palm in Sulawesi, Indonesia as a test case, I demonstrate data collected in a representative sample of languages, and discuss the technical challenges of a truly multilingual multimedia corpus.