Language documentation through oral history archives

Presented by Silvia Calamai, Ardolino Fabio and Rosalba Nodari at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024 Karl Popper's assertion that disciplines do not exist, but problems do perfectly fit to the field of oral archives, a sphere in which a multitude of issues arise on various levels. It is noteworthy that employing audio or video recording for fieldwork is not confined to linguistics; rather, it is a widely adopted practice across numerous social sciences and humanities disciplines. In the domain of contemporary history, the subfield of oral history stands out as one of the biggest producers of oral data, gathered in oral archives. It has evolved over time into an independent research field, dealing with the systematic gathering of living people’s testimony about their experiences. With its dedicated academic journal and associations, oral history has become a thriving domain within historical research (Perks & Thomson, 2015; Calamai, 2023). In Italy, each discipline approaches oral archives differently, developing its own taxonomies, specific metadata sets, and diverse methods of philologic curation. In addition, analog-born oral archives demand diversified curation, particularly regarding the correlation between the original carrier and its contents (interviews, participant observations, etc.). From an archival perspective, paper materials and field diaries closely interrelate with audio documents, necessitating their inclusion in any digitization process (Calamai et al., 2022). The contribution presented here intends to discuss the digitization and revitalization efforts undertaken for an oral archive collected in the 1980s by sociologist and anthropologist Vittorio Dini (1925-2018) in a marginalized region of Central Italy (Sestino and Val Marecchia, eastern Tuscany). This area, currently experiencing significant depopulation and economic decline (Dini, 1990), was previously overlooked by dialectologists. The re-analysis of such archival data promises to enhance our comprehension of sound shifts and linguistic repertoires within the broader context of local landscapes, shedding light on how speakers implicitly or explicitly perceive linguistic changes and their connections to social changes.