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

Welcome to the THATCamp website! We have a few plans in the works for adding features to the site. If you twitter, use the tag #thatcamp in your tweets and we can create an aggregated list of tweets. When blogging on your own site, or uploading relevant pictures to Flickr, tag them with “thatcamp” so other campers can find them too.

If you’ve registered, you’re free to contribute posts to this blog. Anything goes: live-blogging sessions, posts on organizing sessions, post-camp drinks, finding a ride to campus, interesting websites or tools, whatever! Dave and I will be using the blog primarily to keep campers updated on pre-camp plans and announcements.