Archiving the Present, a network for South Asia’s oral knowledge launches in Kochi before WikiConference India

On 3 September, 37 of us are meeting to learn from each other how we can better document our community stories, voices and knowledge and safe-keep them for long. Most have spent over three months learning together online and will meet in person for the first time.

This is the day OpenSpeaks, together with other collaborators, launches Archiving the Present, a community network for oral knowledge in local languages, a manual and a free course of the same name. The network—individual language documenters, archivists, groups and organisations representing local communities, language archives, media institutions, funders, and others—will support the documentation and archiving of South Asia’s languages.

The network will align with a shared goal—that oral knowledge is human knowledge and deserves to be treated as equal to written knowledge. That means fair recognition and fair pay for the people who hold it.

Origin: online workshops

Between 18 May and 24 August, OpenSpeaks ran eight online sessions in collaboration with Adivasi Lives Matter, People’s Archive of Rural India, Whose Knowledge?, Endangered Languages Project, Open Knowledge Initiatives-IITH, Endangered Languages Archive, FOSS United, and Rising Voices. These sessions covered how to plan a documentation project, manage consent and payment, record clean audio and video, handle files and metadata, publish to archives and Wikimedia projects, and raise funds for this work. We opened applications in May: 101 people applied from 14 countries on three continents, who are already documenting or are planning to document nearly 115 languages. 65 of the applicants were from India alone, spread across 17 states.

Based on prior, community-based experience and selected topics, 20 resource persons from seven countries led these sessions. Taukeer Alam, a Van Gujjari writer who spoke with us earlier this year about consent, rights, and recognition in language documentation, taught a session on this topic. Ganesh Birua and Anju Kumari Gagrai taught based on their own work in the Ho language; Opino Gomango in Lanjia-Sora and Juray; Deepak Kumar Beshra and Ramjit Tudu in Santali; Amrit Sufi in Angika; and Mithilesh Baraily across the Kami-Damai-Sarki-Gandharva-Badi language cluster.

Manual and WikiLearn course

These sessions became a field manual called Archiving the Present: A Community Guide to Archiving Languages, Memories, and Knowledges. This new book is built module by module from what each resource person actually taught. It’s written in Simple English so it reaches readers for whom English is a third or fourth language, and is arguably the first manual of its kind to take that language choice seriously. Nearly 20 trainers and three editors wrote it together.

We also turned the same manual into a free certification course on WikiLearn, so anyone can learn beyond the live sessions on their own time and earn a certificate.

Workshop in Kochi

Based on learning from the online workshop and building the manual, we are bringing 12 of the 20 resource persons to an in-person workshop at Kochi. 40 community documenters and archivists, collaborators and resource persons will join this day-long workshop for peer-learning and begin a long-term collaboration. 

They will also learn about recording practice, consent and fair pay, file management, followed by time for every documenter to speak about their own work. We are also using the day to decide, together, what this group does after 3 September. They will also figure out what this network continues to do once the workshop calendar ends.

Network

Archiving the Present as an emerging network will bring together the language documenters and archivists from communities who have shaped this programme so far, and invite more in over time. Most participants named funding as a key barrier. Funding is needed for recording, purchasing equipment, remunerating people and preserving documented media. A network of this kind can assist in many ways: invite donors to share insights on upcoming grants, connect with communities/individuals for microgrants, and support with grant proposal writing.

More information on the network and how to apply to join is available at archivingthepresent.cc.

OpenSpeaks, in collaboration with the speaker communities, has documented and archived over 20 languages across South Asia. We focus on community capacity building through peer training, building tech infrastructure, open educational resources (OER), and now co-creating a network.

Hardware assistance

While funding has been a major barrier to language documentation and archiving, the lack of equipment has hindered this work too.

Our collaborators, TinkerSpace Kochi and PARI, ran campaigns on social media, together with two of our trainers, Deepak Kumar Beshra and Mithilesh Baraily, urging people to donate hardware. These campaigns reached a hundred thousand users, drawing interest.

Thanks to the efforts of FOSS United, we are collaborating with the Sama Digital Foundation, which will donate computers to many workshop participants. They will roll out the first phase soon.

As we organise the workshop, we will also celebrate the 25th anniversary of Creative Commons at the opening Day Zero evening of WikiConference India. This will be one of the four regional celebrations of this event, the other ones being Argentina, Indonesia and Nigeria.

Read the manual, try the course, or get in touch if your community wants to join the network: archivingthepresent.cc.