In My Tongue: Behind The Webdoc

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By Patricia Kanana Mwenda and Candide Uyanze

Culture becomes bilingual not due to the use of two languages but because of the conjuncture of two cultural patterns of thinking. One is national, that of the people, and the other is estranging, that of the -classes subordinated to outside forces. The admiration that the upper classes express for the US or Europe is the highest expression of their subjection. With the colonialization of the upper classes the culture of imperialism indirectly introduces among the masses knowledge which cannot be supervised. (Solanas and Getino 1970, 2)

Introduction

Project Description

Over the course of the Winter 2021 semester, we have developed In My Tongue, a multilingual webdoc that investigates the relationships people have with the languages they speak. A series of interviews were conducted by Candide and Trish from January to April 2021 with nine people from Canada and Kenya in several languages: Bemba, English, French, Kikuyu, Lingala, Meru, and Swahili.

The project’s website, www.inmytongue.net/, houses a database of audio snippets which explore the many layers, nuances, and politics that reside within and between languages. Notable themes, keywords, and topics addressed include:

• Emotions: confusion, conflicted feelings, joy, regret, discomfort, loathing, frustration, relief
• Memories: childhood, language learning, travelling
• Social groups: family, friendship, ancestors, school, village, workplace, tribal/ethnic community, marriage
• Positive elements: advantage, cool factor, “sexy” factor, beauty
• Negative elements: dying language, punishment, colonialism, language barriers, shame
• Miscellaneous: immigration, spirituality/religion, Indigenous languages, dyslexia, slang/dialects, accents, music/singing, intelligence, media, class status, mixing languages (code-switching), intonation

Audience members can filter through the snippets on the “Browse” page, or listen to them all on the “Audio Snippets” page. Visitors can also leave voice and/or written responses to the segments.

Topics Covered

In this text, we will go over the narrative modes of our work, identifying the two modes of our documentary and interactive components. We will also address the key takeaways from our process: the effects of the digital divide on our work, what we learned from our loved ones who participated in the project, and what we learned about ourselves.

Narratives Modes

The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary filmmaking. Every image that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact; it becomes something which the System finds indigestible. (Solanas and Getino 1970, 6)

Type of Documentary

When conceptualizing this documentary, we began with our personal experiences with language, finding commonalities and differences as two women of African descent with parents from different ethnic tribes. This centering of lived experience and personal anecdotes were central to our initial idea. As such, we were less interested in narrating, explaining, justifying, or over-contextualizing our interview segments as neutral, omniscient narrators (as one would find in an expository documentary), in a way that would not be expected of colonial languages. Contrary to an anthropological approach, we were excited by the prospect of centering our narratives as racialized people. As Solanas and Getino (1970) aptly put it when describing Third Cinema movement, “we thus discovered a new facet of cinema: the participation of people who, until then, were considered spectators” (9).

We were especially moved by the following pathway that leads to Indigenous resurgence movements by Taiaiake Alfred, as cited in “Chapter 2: Decolonizing the Digital” of A Digital Bundle:

Our people must recover ways of knowing and relating from outside the mental and ideational framework of colonialism by regenerating themselves in a conceptual universe formed through Indigenous languages. (Wemigwans 2018)

In terms of defining our documentary, the course’s readings have provided useful frameworks. After consulting Nichols (2001) chapter on the types of documentaries in Introduction to Documentary, we felt that In My Tongue was a blend of both the Poetic Mode and Participatory Mode.

The Poetic Mode, as the author explains, forgoes specificity in time and place and conventions of continuity editing in favour of exploring patterns and associations that involve spatial juxtaposition and temporal rhythms (Nichols 2001, 102). Indeed, we have decided to offer a non-linear experience to visitors, as opposed to a rigid sequence of anecdotes. Although we, the filmmakers, “select and arrange [the raw material] into associations and patterns” (102), it is our audience who ultimately decide on their experience. In this way, we’ve decided to represent reality “in terms of a series of fragments, subjective impressions, incoherent acts, and loose associations” (103). This opens up “the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information” (103).

Rather than imbuing our project with statistics and factoids about the languages spoken in the documentary, we wanted to bring audience members into the fold of our conversations, stressing “mood, tone and affect much more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion” (103). This fragmentation and ambiguity remain a “prominent feature” (104) of our work, wherein viewers get a small glimpse of each interviewee’s life, one short anecdote at a time.

Our documentary also makes us of the Participatory Mode. This mode, as Nichols (2001) defines, is when:

The filmmaker steps out from behind the cloak of voice-over commentary, steps away from poetic meditation, steps down from a fly-on-the-wall perch, and becomes a social actor (almost) like any other. (Almost like any other because the filmmaker retains the camera, and with it, a certain degree of potential power and control over events.) (116)

Indeed, we were active participants and interviewees in this project, taking on a more reflective and responsive relationship and moving toward the diary/personal testimonial (Nichols 2001, 120). You hear our own reflections on the topic, and, at times, you’ll hear us respond or ask follow up questions within a segment with our participants.

That said, the author’s caveat in the above block quote about being a social actor “almost” like any other is an important one. Although we were subjects in our documentary, we decided which questions to ask, and Candide edited down all the interviews, making decisions such as removing most of the questions that were asked, removing some of the hesitations, choosing how to split the segments, and so forth. The two of us also decided which segments to keep and which to discard, narrowing our segments down from 147 to 67. Nichols (2001) calls this the “ethics and politics of encounter”, which is “the encounter between one who wields a movie camera [in our case, the audio recorder] and one who does not” (116).

Grappling with this power imbalance can be challenging but important to reflect on, especially when interviewing loved ones who trust us. As such, we made sure to be transparent about how the recordings would be used and how they will be edited. We also sent our questions to interviewees ahead of time, told them they could skip questions they didn’t want to answer, collaborated with them for transcription and translations, and honoured one of our interviewee’s request to use a pseudonym.

All in all, we made use of interviews as a form of social encounter with our participants, bringing “different accounts together in a single story” (Nichols 2001, 122). We would fall into the component of participatory documentarians who “seek to represent [our] own direct encounter with [our] surrounding world” (123). As such, our audience members witness “a form of dialogue between filmmaker and subject that stresses situated engagement, negotiated interaction, and emotion-ladden encounter” (122). After all, “meaning, from a poststructuralist perspective, is seen as intersubjective and is created through competing discourses” (Iseke-Barnes 1997, 207).

Solanas and Getino (1970) offer a compelling perspective on the power of this intersubjective dialogue between people of different nations, stating that:

Testimony about a national reality is also an inestimable means of dialogue and knowledge on the world plane. No internationalist form of struggle can be carried out successfully if there is not a mutual exchange of experiences among the people, if the people do not succeed in breaking out of the Balkanization on the international, continental, and national planes which imperialism is striving to maintain. (6)

Interactivity

Seeing that the present course is called “Interactive Documentary”, having some level of interactivity was to be expected, of course. Interactivity, as O’Flynn (2015) argues, is a defining characteristic of i-Docs and webdocs, “distinct from the preceding linear, spectator experiences of cinematic and broadcast documentaries” (76). This was further stressed when Candide, who worked as a Teaching Assistant for a Video Production course this semester, mentioned her documentary idea to the professor and documentarian she TA’d for. He stated that an interactive documentary wasn’t just a matter of putting audio online and calling it “interactive”. Indeed, our team had to ponder on what could be described as “a 360-degree user experience” (as coined by Hugues Sweeney and cited in O’Flynn):

It’s a switch of point of view from storyteller/author to the person who is living the experience of the project. [ … ] The big question is if a documentary is a representation of the world, how does that representation change if people are actively engaged in the experience? For me it’s the foundation of everything we do, and the notion of experience comes from there. Then there are levels of participation, of collaboration; in some parts people do not create content, some parts people do, but again we really try to shape it from the POV of the user.” (O’Flynn 2015, 76)

Choice, as O’Flynn (2015) explains, is important in granting agency and voice to audience members “in a simple, elegant interaction and interface design” (80). Audience-Interactors of i-Docs do more than interpret textual elements -- they create and arrange them as well, structuring, augmenting, and recombining content (O’Flynn 2015, 76).

The kind of agency, choice, and voice that we’ve granted to our visitors closely resembles what Sandra Gaudenzi (as cited in O’Flynn) calls a closed webdoc as opposed to a “live documentary”, wherein “the primary interactivity or agency is one of choosing the iterative order of fragments as constrained by the database software” (77). Indeed, we have built a database of segments (first in Airtable, and then inside Wix), and allow visitors to either listen to all of them, or filter our database. As such, when considering the “the story, narrative, or content architecture” axes defined by O’Flynn (2015), our work would fall on the “controlled to modular/fragmented” scale of the first axis, and the “finite databases to open” scale of the 2nd axis (83).

 As our classmate, Leslie, aptly commented during our final presentation:

It is almost a meta database. A database of both accents and grammar, word choice (linguistics), but also stories of language. Layers so many layers.

Audience members can also leave voice notes on each segment, although, we don’t think this quite constitutes a live documentary. In a perfect world, where time and other responsibilities were no barriers, it would have been fantastic to explore a more of a user-generated, conversational, generative, and relational “live doc” experience that unfolds over time (77-78).

In terms of user interface design, we’ve meticulously wireframed, prototyped, and iterated our design for the In My Tongue website. The key questions which drove our design were the following:

• What’s the first thing that visitors would see?
• What might they want to do?
• What information would they need?

As we’ve learned from O’Flynn (2015), every innovative i-Doc or webdoc has to pay attention to the mental model that the user/player/audience member will perceive (74). This not only meant discussing design between the two of us, but also getting feedback from friends, family, classmates, and the professor. For instance, Kalina recommended checking the contrast between our background and the white text. Indeed the colour choices in our gradients proved to be an accessibility issue, and the colours were fixed in the following iterations. The next steps for our website would be to address Professor McIntosh’s feedback about making the platform multilingual.

Key Takeaways

Digital Divide in Tools Used

English continues to be one of the leading languages globally with a total of 1.35 billion speakers across the globe, and is the most popular language online, representing 25.9 percent of worldwide internet users (Johnson 2021). The dominance of English, however, brings into question the state and survival of other languages that exist. Our interviewees mention how colonization essentially shifted our relationships with language, and as Nash (2017) mentions in relation to this, “documentary media's relationship to the social world is distinctive. This is particularly the case in relation to questions of citizenship, with documentary long claiming a particular, albeit historically variable, role in its mediation” (9). There is a debate as to whether language has citizenship, so to speak. Just because it originates from one place, does it claim to be from there? The nuances of language, however, go much deeper than that, as even the most global languages have several variations, depending on the location.

The divide of languages does not only exist in the real world, but also in online spaces. One major challenge we faced during the project was transcribing our interviews in the native languages such as Kikuyu, Meru, and Lingala. We had a hard time finding tools which offered speech-to-text online for these languages -- hence the need to transcribe manually. As it stands now, we find that natural language processing (NLP) tools still favour towards Western languages over African ones.

A great example of this is Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text API service, which boasts “extensive language support in over 125 languages and variants” (2021). One of these languages is Icelandic, which has 314,000 speakers. However, Lingala, which has 20+ million speakers, Kikuyu, which has 6.6 million speakers, and Meru, which has 2 million speakers, are not offered in this speech-to-text engine. One concern that came up during the interviews was the death of these native languages. As the number of people who can teach them shrinks, they could potentially disappear. With the rise of online learning, captioned media, and language learning apps due to the pandemic, great thought needs to be put into diversifying the offerings of NLPs in order to ensure that these languages are accessible online. 

The scope of this documentary stretched beyond what it was intended for as we started to find these gaps and further evidence of the digital divide. As Nash (2017) explains, I-docs frequently aspire to expand documentary's political role, particularly by providing new ways of engaging with social issues and opportunities for forms of self-­representation (9). As the participants shared their stories, commonalities started to be perceived and seen regardless of the experiences and backgrounds. In as much as language can sow division amongst people, it can also bring people closer together, making language a very powerful tool.

Lessons Learned from Family and Friends

We often use storytelling as a means of self-expression; it is one of the ways we make life more interesting. None of our participants experienced colonization firsthand, but to date, we all still feel its effects. Today, we live in a world in which our original cultures and traditions are intertwined with those of settlers, and we sometimes find ourselves losing our identities in the midst of this chaos. Solanas and Getino (1970) offer an interesting perspective about the interweaving of cultures and neocolonialism, stating that:

Just as they are not masters of the land upon which they walk, the neocolonialized people are not masters of the ideas that envelop them. A knowledge of national reality presupposes going into the web of lies and confusion that arise from dependence. The intellectual is obliged to refrain from spontaneous thought; if he does think, he generally runs the risk of doing so in French or English -- never in the language of a culture of his own which, like the process of national and social liberation, is still hazy and incipient. Every piece of data, every concept that floats around us, is part of a framework of mirages that it is difficult to take apart. (2)

Hearing the stories from our friends and families opened up new perspectives and ideas about how people relate to language. For instance, Candide was surprised to learn that her mother, Lumenganu, also experienced French at school in a very punitive way, despite having gone to school in two different continents (albeit, for different reasons).

Another major take away was the fact that language makes us feel vulnerable as humans. We have a need to fit in, for fear of being seen as awkward and weird. Hence, we have learned to adapt to our surroundings. We want to learn English because it is thought to be ‘cool’ and we aspire to be multilingual to seem ‘exotic’ and ‘intelligent’, but, at the same time, society works against us by putting us in boxes to fit ‘a specific type of person’. In the end, all we are trying to do is be our true, authentic selves without feeling like we are being judged. 

Documentary's social functions, its connection to social participation and citizenship, journalistic investigation and the exploration of alternative perspectives (Corner 2002, 260) inform the use of digital technologies, just as these technologies and their representational possibilities and cultures are shaping the political uses of documentary (Nash 2017, 9). Political divide can break societies. We’ve seen wars start between different tribes of the same country, and, on an even more personal level, there was a story told about being punished while in primary school for speaking a certain language, yet the innocence of being a child is to simply enjoy life. Denying that freedom to a child and witnessing the aftermath of these divides can really affect them as an adult. One story that really stood out to Trish was about someone who was being made fun of by other students for not being able to speak English, and swearing to never speak their native tongue again because they felt ashamed of it. No child should have to go through such heartache because language is beautiful, and knowing more than one is always an advantage.

What we learned about ourselves

While working on this documentary, we faced several challenges. Some of these included building a database-driven website for the first time, working through time differences, transcribing some of the interviews without automated speech-to-text. Along the way, however, we have learned to work through these challenges. People always talk about this idea of seeing something through fresh eyes (different perspective) and this project was about learning, unlearning, and relearning through teamwork. Each of us brought our own voice and perspectives in the direction we intended for the project. It is never an easy task to work with other people, but our partnership worked because of our mutual understanding and respect, which made it easier. Group projects are also not just about working to one's strengths; it is also about learning new skills and sharing ideas. As participants of this project, we also used our voices to tell our stories, wherein “storytelling becomes a catalyst for strengthening collective identity, community knowledge and social capital” (Nash 2017, 17). In spite of the fact that we come from different backgrounds, the similarities of our lived experience added a multifaceted layer to our project, and our stories fostered mutual understanding.

During the four months we worked on this project, Candide learned that she was underestimating herself in her Lingala writing and transcribing capabilities, and Trish learned how to build a website with the guidance of Candide. This fostered a deeper understanding of collaborative work and trust. Design work always needs some kind of collaboration, no matter the simplicity of the work. Objective truths from an outsider always draws back the creator to help them improve on their craft. Something we learn from Human Centered Design is the fact that design is for the audience and not the creator. We must always remember to keep in mind that the work will be used and seen by others, and they will never know what went on behind the scenes. That said, the focus should be on how the work makes them feel. One of the key takeaways we learned along this journey is trusting in the process and looking to each other for guidance and support.

Conclusion

This project tied together two people from very different backgrounds with overlapping experiences in terms of their relationship to language. The interviews we conducted sparked dialogue and ideas about how people think about language. The truths and lived experiences shared were only a glimpse into how this i-doc can be further explored. In as much as the world around us is ever changing, language, which is a tool for communication, helps us make sense of the world because words give meaning to the world around us. This project has been a learning experience, not just for us, but also for the people involved and, to a much larger extent, the people who have and will interact with the project. We appreciate that one way we learn is by listening.

One of the things we learned along this journey is that there is a need to keep native languages alive because they give us a sense of feeling at home, regardless of where in the world one may be. The technological gap of these language tools need to be explored further. We must think of ways these native African languages and dialects can be accessible online, as well as the need for more representation in language models. Sharing stories of lived experiences brings us closer together and makes us more human. In conclusion, this project has the potential to further explore the way we can extend our reach of awareness of the potential to globalize all the languages.

References

Corner, John. 2002. ‘Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions’. Television & New Media 3 (3): 255–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/152747640200300302. 

Google Cloud. 2021. ‘Speech-to-Text: Automatic Speech Recognition’. Google Cloud. 2021. https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text.

Iseke-Barnes, Judy M. 1997. ‘Poststructuralist Analysis of Reading and Writing through/with Technology’. Curriculum Studies 5 (2): 195–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681369700200008. 

Johnson, Joseph. 2021. ‘Internet: Most Common Languages Online 2020’. Statista. 27 January 2021. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262946/share-of-the-most-common-languages-on-the-internet/. 

Nash, Kate. 2017. ‘1. I-Docs and the Documentary Tradition: Exploring Questions of Citizenship’. In I-Docs, edited by Judith Aston, Sandra Gaudenzi, and Mandy Rose, 9–25. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/asto18122-006. 

Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Indiana University Press.

O’Flynn, Siobhan. 2015. ‘Designed Experiences in Interactive Documentaries’. In Contemporary Documentary, edited by Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara, 72–86. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315725499-14. 

Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino. 1970. ‘Toward a Third Cinema’. Cinéaste 4 (3): 1–10.

Wemigwans, Jennifer. 2018. A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online. University of Regina. https://uofrpress.ca/Books/A/A-Digital-Bundle.