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Dietrich SCHÜLLER
Consultant, Vienna Phonogrammarchive;
Vice Chair, Intergovernmental Council,
UNESCO Information for All Programme
(Vienna, Austria)
Audio and Video Documents at Risk:
Safeguarding the Documents Proper of Linguistic Diversity
and Orally Transmitted Cultures 50
It is almost trivial to state that written text documents are inadequate tools to
represent acoustical phenomena such as spoken language, dialect, and music,
or optical manifestations of rituals, dances, etc. This applies specifically for
orally transmitted cultures where no traditional relations are in place between
texts and spoken language, or traditional forms of notations, e.g. for music and/
or dance. Verbal descriptions and written texts are insufficient and subjective,
and this makes historical studies in ethnolinguistics, ethnomusicology, and
social anthropology at large, cumbersome and rudimentary.
However, this situation has changed with advent of audiovisual documentation
technology in the 19 th century: photography was available since 1839, the
phonograph was invented in 1877 and cinematography emerged in the 1880s
and 1890s.
The development of the phonograph was specifically associated with the
scientific interest to understand the physics and physiology of human speech.
Consequently, the phonograph has attracted linguists and anthropologists
immediately since its practical availability in 1889/90. Systematic language
and music recordings were at the cradle of emerging disciplines like phonetics,
ethnolinguistics and dialectology, as well as ethnomusicology. Their histories
are closely associated with the history of sound recording. Consequently,
this led to the systematic establishment of sound archives, namely so-called
“Phonogram Archives”, the first in Vienna in 1899, followed by Berlin in 1900,
and in 1908 by St. Petersburg.
50
This paper is based on an earlier study (Schüller 2008) carried out within EU-funded project TAPE -
Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe, 2004-2008. The general situation of audiovisual documents,
in which the situation of research materials is embedded, has recently been discussed at the International
Conference Preservation of Digital Information in the Information Society: Problems and Prospects, Moscow,
October 2011 (Schüller, 2012).
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