A Tutorial for Video in Spoken Language Documentation

Spoken language always goes along with meaningful visible behavior, such as gesture and eye gaze. But while language use is multimodal, published recommendations and formal training in spoken language documentation tend to focus almost exclusively on the audio part of the signal. Therefore, this tutorial provides a practical guide to using video as part of a spoken language documentation project. We motivate why these projects should consider recording video, and we then describe the equipment needs, recording setups, and post-processing workflow required for collecting transcribable video. We also discuss the unique ethical/privacy concerns raised by video recording and archiving. Overall, our goal is to centralize and formalize the recommendations about video that have long circulated in oral form, or as grey literature, in documentation circles. The scripts in the supplementary materials are maintained <a href="https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://github.com/amaliaskilton/auto-ffmpeg__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!RZQFbNOEre7MeT8vM-g_GcQq3N0JfiFc6Hif7Cf7NWfqL4DHxVpW4oOMYr_SnmAC3rtW_b6iMNJr_rqou2k$">here</a>.