This paper is currently under review but in case it’s useful, we’ve put a preprint here.
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/amaliaskilton/2024/12/20/december-2024-tutorial-article-on-video-for-spoken-language-documentation/
(We say “spoken language documentation” because our focus is on video recording for people who primarily analyze audio, and there are already a number of excellent tutorials for signed language documention; see the text for references.)
Here’s the information from Amalia’s website:
Many language documentation researchers would like to record video, but have a hard time getting started. That makes sense — we’re rarely trained in collecting video, and it can be technically challenging.
To lower the barriers, I wrote a detailed tutorial with Claire Bowern (Yale) about recording video in linguistic fieldwork/language documentation.
The abstract reads:
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.