Wechselnde Formate. Zur rezenten Geschichte der Sprachaufnahmen des Berliner Lautarchivs – ein Bericht

Abstract

Changing Modes: The Recent History of the Voice Recordings in the Berlin Sound Archive. The Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) of the Humboldt‐Universität zu Berlin is a collection of language and voice recordings dating back to recording activities in prisoner of war camps during World War I. Since 1990 the recordings have been included in and used for various scientific and cultural modes of research and presentation. This article illustrates the ways in which the collection in both its entirety as well as in its individual objects have been transformed and relocated, thus changing their meanings within these different contexts. Particularly their inclusions into these very different structural and cultural modes have not only opened up new dimensions and opportunities, but at the same time also have shown specific limitations and determinations. The Sound Archive appears to thus be an example of an academic collection at the interfaces of both cultural and scientific activity in a constant process of transformation.

Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive

“…39 As I have shown elsewhere, Lüders did not seem entirely convinced of the sonic scientific enterprise-despite his efforts (Hilden 2015). For him and many other Commission members, the sound recordings represented a by-product of the transliteration, which scholars continued to build their analyses on (Hennig 2016;Kaplan 2013;Meyer-Kalkus 2015). Moreover, Lüders' attitude and actions suggest that he had ethical concerns regarding the anthropometric studies of Felix von Luschan and his student Egon von Eickstedt (1892Eickstedt ( -1965.…”