Using technology to maintain the orality of oral history
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 | Jeremy Boggs
Hi Everyone!
I’ll add my enthusiasm for the range of projects currently under discussion. It promises to be an exciting and informative weekend.
Here at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (based at Concordia University, in Montreal) we are in the process of creating an in-house, open source, transcribing / archiving / annotating tool that will be geared to meet the specific needs of oral historians. The basic features of the new program are known as many other software programs can be repurposed. However, what is not available is an interface geared specifically to the needs of the oral historian. At THATCamp, I had hoped to demo an early version of the new tool, but it will not be ready yet. I can however demo (if people are interested) how we use Vertov, a media annotating plugin for Zotero, and Interclipper, a proprietary media database program, to manage and analyze oral histories.
The goal is to use technology to move beyond traditional textual analysis of oral history transcripts to a direct examination of the video and audio record. Essentially, we want to maintain the orality of oral history by using technology.
I am hoping to connect with others who use oral histories, or more generally audio or video recordings, and discuss / shared our strategies for using technology to analyze these types of sources. Furthermore, at the Centre we are in the early stages of this project’s development, so I would very much welcome the opportunity to network with others working on their own software projects to get a sense of how one undertakes such a task.
Cheers,
Krissy
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:49 am
Krissy,
I would like to learn about the plans for the new application and to see the demo of how you use Vertov now.
Margie McLellan
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
We’ve been working at UVA on Digital Story Telling in K-12 schools for the past four years with a webapp called “PrimaryAccess” (www.primaryaccess.org) and would love to talk digital storytelling.
-Bill Ferster
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:31 pm
I’ve had students in several different classes engaged in oral interviews (veterans, women over 55, and alumni) and would be very interested in talking more about your project and our own experiences with working with audio/video interview recordings.
May 24th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I would be interested in hearing about the Digital Story Telling in K-12 schools — I just agreed to teach Early Childhood Social Studies in the fall for the first time and I may teach middle childhood social studies down the road (along with history classes that I already teach).
Margie McLellan
May 25th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
It sounds like a Digital Storytelling session is in order. I would be more than happy to join in with a Vertov demo. I’ll also bring along screen shots of Interclipper. If I was to demo it as well I would need to bring along my PC in addition to my MAC.
May 28th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
[…] Krissy’s post on oral histories and Vertov was relevant to what we are working on in video. In opera, dance, and history, we are developing Critical Video Editions that allow for a more scholarly analysis of video. The problem with most video currently online is that access is almost always at the full work level or at the small clip level with no context of the overall piece. Just as technology enables text analysis, data mining, and other advanced research with texts, we are aiming to create tools to enable that kind of study with video. In particular, we are working on ways to clip, annotate, and segment video at a more granular level as well as enable searching on the subtitles or transcript of a video. I’ll be happy to share a beta of what we are working on, and I’d love to see other ideas. […]
May 29th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I would add my vote to a session on digitizing oral histories and how that data can be integrated into on-line storytelling. I use oral histories to reconstruct historic neighborhoods and would love to brainstorm on ways to integrate remembrances with the physicality of historic structures, maps, photos, etc.
May 30th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
[…] I’m also interested in crashing a session on analyzing video/audio and critical video editions because I work on Vertov, the video analysis tool that came up in the […]
May 30th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
I’ll also look forward to crashing. Interclipper forms the backbone of our oral history and sounds collecting, as well as public history projects (both along the Euclid Corridor and in the Cultural Gardens.) We have trained dozens of regional folks, especially teachers, to use Interclipper to creat indexes for sounds in regional museums and instructional purposes. A few are even getting their 10th graders involved. I am very interested in discussing the extension of this methodology (which is how Michael Frisch conceives it) into a technology for interpretive and collecting collaborations.
May 4th, 2010 at 2:53 am
[…] thatcamp.org/2008/05/using-technology-to-maintain-the-orality-of-oral-history/ […]