Archiving the Present: A Community Guide to Archiving Language, Memories & Knowledges
OpenSpeaks
About This Course
Language documentation does not begin with perfect equipment, and it does not end when a file is uploaded. It begins with a community deciding what matters enough to record, and continues through consent, care, recording, description, publication, archiving, and the work of keeping that knowledge usable over time.
Archiving the Present teaches the full cycle of community-based language documentation. You will learn how to plan a project around your own community's motivations, ask for and record consent, record clear audio and video with whatever equipment you already have, organise and back up your files, write metadata, publish safely, archive for the long term, and find funding for the work.
The course is designed for community documenters and archivists, especially people working alone or in a small group, without formal training in linguistics or archiving and without a trainer or workshop available to guide them. Each module teaches its ideas directly to you so you can work through the material independently.
- Plan documentation around what a community wants to record and why.
- Work with informed consent, rights, licenses, safety, and fair payment.
- Record clear audio and video using the equipment already available to you.
- Name, organise, edit, back up, transcribe, subtitle, and describe media files.
- Prepare media and metadata for archives and other memory institutions.
- Make deliberate decisions about what should be published, where, and under what conditions.
- Think of archiving as an ongoing community practice, not only as preservation of the past.
- Identify possible routes to funding documentation and archiving work.
You can move through the course from beginning to end, or go directly to the module you need. The eight modules cover planning, consent and payment, recording, file management, metadata, publishing, archiving as an ongoing practice, and fundraising.
If you want to teach this material to someone else, one-to-one or in a workshop, every module ends with a section called "Teaching this module."
Two appendices follow the main modules: a Text Style Guide for captioning, subtitling, and transcribing, and the Oral Knowledge Framework that underpins the course's approach to community review, consent, FAIR and CARE principles, remuneration, and multilingual transcription.
You do not need formal training to begin.
No prior training in linguistics, archiving, or ethics is required. This course is written for people documenting their own community's language, stories, or knowledge, including people who have no trainer or workshop available to guide them.
You will find it useful to have:
- A phone, camera, or recorder you already own. The course teaches recording with whatever equipment is available, not specialised gear.
- Basic comfort reading English. The course text is in English; the live sessions it is drawn from were bilingual.
- An interest in documenting or archiving material from your own community, whether or not you have started already.
Nearly 20 trainers taught this course. Each led a live bilingual session on their own part of the documentation and archiving process, and the modules were built from those sessions. The people named below are this course's instructors and resource persons.
Each trainer's own background appears as a field note inside their module, alongside the part of the process they taught.
What web browser should I use?
The Open edX platform works best with current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari.
Do I need prior experience in linguistics or archiving to take this course?
No. The course is written for community documenters working without formal training, and explains each idea from the start. If you already have some experience, you can move directly to the modules you need.