Comments on: Synchronicity: Merging Text with Audio/Video Components of Oral History Online

By: Mike Christel

Mike Christel — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:23:50 +0000

I had the pleasure of hearing Doug Boyd speak at the Oral History Assoc. (OHA) meeting in 2010. I strongly believe that synchronized metadata helps promote access to oral history collections. At OHA 2008 and OHA 2010, automated speech alignment was demonstrated tying transcripts to spoken narrative, and showing where matches occur after text or map queries in the interviews. That work builds from Carnegie Mellon’s NSF-funded Informedia digital video library work, and is itself funded by NSF. See www.idvl.org for more details and current instances using 2 oral history collections: The HistoryMakers African American oral history digital archive, and the Highmark Blue Shield Living Legacy Series celebrating the 150th birthday of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Enjoy the improving interfaces into oral history collections!

By: William G. Cowan

William G. Cowan — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:26:03 +0000

The Ethnograhic Video for Instruction and Analysis project at Indiana University developed a set of tools to segment and annotate digital video from the field videos of ethnographers. One feature of this annotation tool (the Annotator’s Workbench, AWB) is the ability to create a transcript of a song or spoken text. We do this in a most rudimentary way and have been searching for a better approach. This project seems to have come a lot further that we have and I am very interested in seeing your presentation.

By: Doug Boyd

Doug Boyd — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:17:23 +0000

sorry, no guest passes. I tried. I will demo it onsite however.

By: Boone Gorges

Boone Gorges — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:32:20 +0000

I recently stumbled on www.snapstream.com/, which is a commercial company trying to make TV broadcasts searchable in a similar way that you are: with time-stamped transcripts. I’m curious to learn whether you’ve explored some of the ways that your work might dovetail with or piggyback on efforts to commercialize the technology of speech-to-text, etc.

By: Erin Bell

Erin Bell — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 21:06:27 +0000

I took a look at the time-synced oral histories and am very impressed! We are always looking for ways to increase the usability of long oral history sound files (we have a collection of about 500 oral histories at CSU) and have done some experimenting with different approaches but have never had the time or resources for the kind of development you have done here. I am really excited by the multiple access points, with researchers being able to read the transcript, search full text, and jump to specific points in the transcript and/or file based on search/browse results. I cannot think of anything missing from that equation.

I’ll be looking forward to hearing more about the technology, processing, formats, etc. Any chance you can hook us a up with a guest pass to experiment with/tour the OHMS web tool?

By: Katie Holt

Katie Holt — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:33:14 +0000

I’m very interested in hearing more about your project. At the College of Wooster, we’re discussing a format where our students could construct public history websites to present their senior independent study research projects. Many of our students create oral histories as part of their research, so I’m eager to hear about your experiences. I have done some work with Omeka, so I was drawn to the websites that use this platform to share oral histories, including the Bracero History Archive (braceroarchive.org/).