CIRCA:Catherine Mason's "Digital Documentation of Oral Discourse Genres."

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Mason, Catherine. “Digital Documentation of Oral Discourse Genres.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25.3(2010): 321-36. Academic Search Complete.

Mason’s article provides a framework of the VOVA platform: the Vocal and Verbal Arts archive that focuses on performance ethnography, and specifically, “editing stylized oral discourse” (321) in the digital age. Essentially a storage site for multiple types of media that document “live performance” (322), the VOVA project aims to standardize the various methodologies used in ethnographical research through text editing (using TEI markup), and to create efficient access to this research through digital databases. Two supervisory committees: the Advisory Board (comprised of linguistic ethnographers and computer linguists) and Editorial Board (linguists and specialists in oral tradition field research) “oversee” the ethnographical data inputted. Through the specific example of the Genre Database, a compendium of oral speech genres, Mason highlights the difficulties and strategies in constructing digital databases that involve cross-cultural content. The most prominent of these is the ideological risk associated with “naming” or genre classification. Mason questions whether the use of Anglophone terms that describe an Anglophone genre can accurately apply to other cultures (323). A large portion of Mason’s article specifically catalogues, with the aid of visual tables, how the Genre Database structures its data entry fields in a way that keeps query-results simple without compromising the complexity and specificity of the oral tradition content. These additional fields include linguistic community (with sub-fields), context data, detail (structure, musical composition, and functional aspects), and stylistics, or the development of “poetic effect” (330). A dictionary-like interface results that Mason hopes will benefit current performance ethnographers and be compatible with future comparative research.
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