This idea perhaps isn’t so enthusing at first sight, but I’ll try nevertheless to make a case. In short, I think we are not acknowledging the power of the spoken word, given the immense possibilities of information sharing via the internet. In lacking a comprehensive directory of public oration, we constrain ourselves from experiencing our collective humanity. I therefore registered the domain “speech-repository.wiki”, on which I plan to host a site dedicated to speech recordings and their transcripts.
I was inspired by the French government website vie-publique.fr (a division under the Directorate of Legal and Administrative Information). It provides transcripts of speeches relevant to public discourse. For many politicians, the list is comprehensive and transcripts are of high quality.
So, if I want to replicate it, why create a new site? After all, there is a project under the Wikimedia Foundation called “Wikisource”, launched in 2003 as a service to support Wikipedia by hosting primary-source material.1 Like other Wikimedia projects embodying collaborative principles, anyone can import into it primary-source material, including speeches, and then accessibly organise the pieces. There are a few issues:
Dormancy of the project: The Wikisource project is not an established repository of speeches. Speeches are not consistently categorised into the category “Speeches”, nor is there a clear convention for organising speeches. There is no adherence to a uniform style (punctuation, etc.). The few speeches on the site are all arbitrarily titled, even though most do not have an established title. The project is rather much more focussed on being a host for materials such as scans of old books and manuscripts.
Strict presumption of liability to copyright litigation: The Wikimedia Charter characterises its subordinate projects as “an international, sociocultural movement, whose vision is to bring free knowledge to the whole world”. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons licence. Simultaneously, the project is committed to abiding by copyright law in the United States (and other jurisdictions, depending on the project’s language edition). Therefore, material with the slightest potential of exposing them to copyright litigation is usually swiftly deleted. The copyright situation of speeches is not uniform across the world. In France and South Africa, copyright law explicitly disqualifies public speeches from copyright protection. In the US and Australia, there is no such distinction. Thus, the absence of copyright liability is not explicitly guaranteed even disseminating transcripts of Nelson Mandela’s speeches in such jurisdictions. But apart from the case Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc., there have been no notable instances of copyright litigation over speeches originally intended by the orator for public dissemination. My site will operate with common sense in regards to copyright. Speeches will not be excluded solely due to a lack of explicitly affirmative legal certainty. Transcribing and disseminating a public speech in its unabridged entirety, when there is no existing publicly accessible transcription, is very often consistent with the orator’s own interests.
Who will use the site?
“Speech corpus” projects (as they’re often called) provide some hints:2 3
- Learners and teachers of English (and eventually other languages) as a foreign language
- Education and research
- Study of oration
- Politics
- Linguistical research and training of AI models (for the subset of content that will be explicitly affirmed as certainly public domain)
- Facilitate intercultural communication through decentralised translation of speeches via the Mediawiki interface
There is also a so-called “speech bank” website — American Rhetoric. My proposed wiki will essentially be an upgrade of that in terms of a modern user interface and Mediawiki-enabled collaborative editing.
Next steps
- Learn the technical aspects
- Networking knowledge such as DNS and the role of ICANN
- Mediawiki
- Write custom templates
- Develop a hierarchy for the wiki pages
- Multilingual support (user interface and eventually hosting of non-English speeches)
- Content: add some speeches
- Develop some policies for the site
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource&oldid=1234459245#History ↩︎
- http://accent.gmu.edu/about.php ↩︎
- https://varieng.helsinki.fi/CoRD/corpora/SCPS/ ↩︎
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