Contextual clips: Prioritizing neglected recordings in corpora

Abstract

We collaborated to investigate humor in the existing corpus of Kere (ISO639-3: sst). This collaboration was a useful test of the Kere corpus and led to the rediscovery of unarchived video recordings, which contained important contextual information. These videos had been deprioritized in the original deposit, but they contained important information that could be used as both data and metadata. We propose the term contextual clips for incidentally-collected recordings which have been deprioritized in some way. Contextual clips may be more naturalistic and offer an effective way to supplement written metadata and other contextual information. Our experience investigating humor also revealed that collaboration as a process can serve as a means to test a corpus. Working across disciplines helped identify future user needs, such as missing contextual information that may not be obvious to a researcher familiar with the corpus. Collaborative research may thus be an elegant solution to some of the known issues in mobilizing corpora. We encourage other researchers who manage corpora to identify contextual clips they may have, evaluate why the files were deprioritized originally, and to consult with communities on how to manage individual files.