The explanatory video portal started in 2022. In May it will be three years since the first video was released, and the project already has a solid catalog. All the videos published so far are more than 140, with a couple of videos presented every week during the course. Recently the initiative has received the Communication Trophy of the Rikardo Arregi Journalism Awards.
Basque in a video-crossroad
There is a ghost that scares basque speakers community: we spend more and more hours at screens—even if we don’t have a very clear explanation of what a screen is—and the diagnosis gives us an impotence equal to what we feel when we see our reflexion on the black mirror of the cellphone. Basque language is not in those places where basque people are.
We call it the habit of consumption, but it could also be the most common way of life today. There is no digital or analog world; hybrid is our day. It’s the same as a breather or a stranger; a city, a village or a rural area. Young people spend more hours a year in front of a screen than inside the school walls. They visit more on YouTube than on Google. Hours in ten seconds of video. How many teachings, transversal experiences and community feelings are built in this daily practice? Almost six hours a day, competing with the hours we spent sleeping. What else do you spend so much time on?
Encyclopedia of the 21st century
Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in Basque. We use it for quick consultations, but also in educational contexts. It is an encyclopedia that plays the role of encyclopedias of the last century, but also some more modern functions. It has a unique character: we are building it in the neighborhood, here among hundreds of people, in order to promote and multiply free knowledge.
If audiovisuals are the most consulted content, and Basque Wikipedia is one of the most used portals in Basque, why not create explanatory videos in Basque to complete the encyclopedia, and bring free encyclopedia forms to video platforms?
The catalogue
Looking at the models of Crash Course, Khan Academy, Academia Play... that are strong in the Basque Country, we decided to create the portal of explanatory videos in Basque in 2022.
We organized the project in the collection and set a theme, a tone and a goal for each field. We now have nine collections of everything and the intention and desire to create more in the short term.
Philosophy
What can we not talk about? What is intersectional feminism? What is a family? Is there any knowledge we have since birth? Aristotle, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Joxe Azurmendi, Kant, Sally Haslanger...
We are guided in this section by the professors of the Agora Philosophy Society and the researchers of the Joxe Azurmendi Chair of the UPV/EHU, with whom we choose the topics and work on the contents. The voice is given by Klara Badiola, who turns each author or current into a 7-8 minute animation by the production company Tres Damillas. We have made 22 videos.
Economy
What is inflation? How is the IRPF calculated? What does the new law on self-employed people say? How to make an income statement? Alazne Astorga explains the daily economy. We travel with the Laneki association for the elaboration of content and with several professors of Professional Training. We made 17 videos.
Basque culture
Can poetry create a city? How many bans have we faced? How did the United Euskara come about? A selection of Basque literature at the beginning and Basque culture in the last year. Iraq, the animated version of the teacher Elbira Zipitria, summarizes the milestones of Basque culture in this series of animations. We have over 20 content consultants.
The environment
Can migrating animals bring things with them? How do invasive species reach new ecosystems? Aitor Cevidanes interviews Basque researchers to learn more about the environment.
The digital challenges
How will Artificial Intelligence affect speakers of minority languages? What is an algorithm? To what extent are we slaves of screens? How to distinguish between truth and lies in the era of fake news? Presented by Leire Palacios, these are explanatory videos about the digital environments that we create together with the Badalab Language Innovation Laboratory. Indirectly, the department offers an opportunity to address the challenges and dilemmas of the Basque language in these technologies. There are 16 videos in total.
Short eight
What is the highest mountain in the Basque Country? How many islands do we have? What is a Tupustari? How many people go to Sanfermin? Eight facts about eleven significant topics in one minute. Anabel Arraiza puts her voice in these very short vertical videos. There are already over 50 videos.
Universal Literature
Who was Safo? Who"s Dante Alighieri? Why is Don Quixote a tragicomedy? Directed by Itziar Orbegozo and Imanol Epeld, reference in the audiovisuals of the Basque network, produced by Aranburu Films. The section reviews various authors and milestones of universal literature, inviting the listener to enjoy reading.
History
Did whale hunting exist before Moby Dick? Was the French Revolution a revolution of the people or of the bourgeoisie? Were we conquered by the Romans or not? With a humorous tone, the contrast of two historians, we have begun to make videos about history. Danel Pascual presents the actors and behind the work is the production company Bira.
Our ancestors
What makes us human? Did you know that we are all descendants of Eneko Arista? Is humanity unique? In order to better understand biology in the department led by Galdór González, we will go back from ourselves, through the tree of evolution, to the knowledge of what is at the base of all species.
Nine collections, 130 videos
There are other worlds to the question, and while not all of them can ever be answered, there have been a lot of work done in the Hall of Vision over the past three years. The videos are embedded in Wikipedia and the portal ikusgela.eus, but also in Youtube, Peertube and social media services. We create them with the aim of being suggestive for anyone who may be interested in the topics, but it is true that they are mainly used in educational contexts.
These videos that we have created are already embedded in 500 pages of the Basque Wikipedia, also offering the multimedia option to the encyclopedia. Without being our first goal, it has also gained international fame. The project has been presented at several international conferences, we have collaborated with the WikiCred program, which has led to the duplication of six philosophy videos in Catalan, and many others to be subtitled voluntarily. The videos in the viewing room have at least one subtitle in the following languages: English, Spanish, French, Catalan, Hausa, Bengali, Arabic, Turkish, Slovenian, Gaelic, Greek, Mapudunguna, Japanese, Wolof, Welsh, Italian, Portuguese, Rif and Russian.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
What is free content? What is an OER? This is the definition of UNESCO in: “Learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium, whether publicly owned or copyrighted, and published under an open licence, which allows access, reuse, refurbishment, adaptation and redistribution at no cost to third parties.” (UNESCO 2019).
Wikipedia itself is OER. There are many examples of material: In Jakindun they make beautiful explanatory videos of mathematical, physical and chemical exercises and publish them on free license. There are hundreds of OER in the EIMA catalogue and in the Amarauna warehouse. We haven"t invented anything, and we"re not here to replace anything. The viewpoint adds a new layer to the ecosystem of free content in Basque. The anomaly, however, is that the channels of similar international video broadcasters are usually not free content.
It is free because the videos are open and we publish them in the CC-BY-SA license. That is, the videos can be used at will, provided that the author is recognized in this derivative work, and that the new production that is created is also published under the same open license. We ourselves do so with the resources used in the videos: music, but above all images; they are free and are recognized as such. At the end of each video there is a link where, included, all the elements of that video are recognized. The video by philosopher Byung-Chul Han, for example, includes 179 images (all of which are here: https://w.wiki/AD6y). Most of them belong to the Wikimedia Commons free repository, but there are also other sources. The license of most Basque media is also CC-BY-SA, so we also use their images for videos. In the 2023 edition of the yearbook that you have in your hands, the Wikipedian Galdr González, we have here a beautiful practice that is an international anomaly in this sense (González Larrañaga, 2023). Unfortunately, the licenses in the image repositories of many foundations are not fully open and impose absurd limits on the supreme purpose of these archives. The inferior languages must release the anchor of this anachronistic privilege.
Be everything to do and feel exemplary
The Basque language needed a portal like this and we have the feeling that it has arrived much later than desired. On the other hand, however, when we explain the project in the Wikimedia exchanges, the members of the other free encyclopedias see the project with surprise and envy. We presented the initiative at the Spanish Wikipedia congress in Salamanca, where one of the public said “I want to be like you when I grow up”. In the article Artificial Intelligence (https://w.wiki/7WgN) of the Spanish Wikipedia portal, there is a video of the topic with audio in Basque, with subtitles in Spanish (and in five other languages). A video in Basque in the most visited encyclopedia of the fashion word, one of the main languages. In the last year the article has received 1,354,048 visits, 3,690 daily. Free content breaks many boundaries. If we really believe in linguistic diversity, we have to listen to languages, make the contact bidirectional.
The numbers
It was a successful year in 2024. We have published a total of 74 videos, divided into eight different departments, two of them new: Universal literature and history. Together, we’ve created 348 minutes of new content, almost six hours, using 2,514 free images. All the videos published so far are 130 and accumulate 342 subtitles. There are six duplicate videos.
There are already 504 pages on Wikipedia with a video from Ikusgela, the content of these pages has been uploaded 512,369 times in a year.
On YouTube we have surpassed the barrier of almost 2,000 subscribers, with an increase of 737 during the year. Last year’s videos have received a total of 75 comments, 1,163 likes and 1,968 shares. With all the videos accumulated, there were 111,629 views, 5,269 hours of content in Basque.
Although it may seem contradictory, the numbers are not the most important. Indirectly, our goal is to occupy another place that was missing from the dissemination in Basque. We needed some short explanatory videos, and that’s where we have them. Our intent and strength is not only to create content in Basque, but to create content that is meaningful, guaranteed and well done. That’s where we put our strength. Convinced that Basque requires not only quantity, but also decent content, and eager to do the best that we can. There’s still a lot of work to do, but we’re happy with what we’ve done, we’re proud of the many videos we’ve created, and we want to keep it that way.
Looking forward to
In the early days we anticipated that with a solid catalogue we would be able to reach more people. Now we are at that moment, dreaming of taking bigger steps to become more popular in the educational community and also in the contents of the Basque network to achieve referentiality. There are also data that tell us that we are on this path: we have been awarded the Communication Prize of the last Rikardo Arregi Awards. In addition to this recognition, autumn visits have grown considerably: for example, on International Basque Language Day, videos of Basque culture received 500 visits between 8 and 10 a.m. The videos were placed in 500 classrooms?
Ikusgela adds the audiovisual layer to the Wikipedia Educational Project in Basque, and given what the quantitative visits and the teachers and students tell us, it is worth consolidating and expanding the project.
The deficiencies that we already had are not enough, and Artificial Intelligence has posed new challenges to less common languages. If we want to educate audiovisual consumers in Basque, we will not lack challenges. Are we doing this in a collective way, do you want to be a promoter of free knowledge in Basque rather than a mere spectator?
References
By Gonzalez Larrañaga, G. (2023). From the main bertsolari tournament to Nord Stream: the importance of free content in a non-hegemonic language. According to In H. Castro and L. A review of Mimenza (Eds. ), Basque Media Yearbook 2022-23 (pp. 79-84)
https://behategia.eus/eu/urtekaria_artikulua/7-bertsolari-txapelketa-nagusitik-nord-streamera-eduki-libreen-garrantzia-hizkuntza-ez-hegemoniko-batean/