If you're not already aware of it, you ought to take a look at Stories 
Matter 
(http://storytelling.concordia.ca/storiesmatter/announcing-stories-matter-v-1-6e/about-stories-matter), 
an open source oral history database tool developed at Concordia 
University in Canada. SM allows archiving of digital video and audio 
materials, enabling oral historians to annotate, analyze, etc.


On 10/3/2012 6:22 AM, Gary McGath wrote:
> On 10/2/12 8:44 AM, Paul Orkiszewski wrote:
>> Hi 4libers,
>>
>> Does anyone know of something - a kiosk, an iPad app, a web application
>> - that:
> I don't know of anything like it out there, but let's look at what it
> might take. I've done some software work in connection with Harvard's
> Iranian Oral History Project.
>
>> - Initiates an oral history interview by getting demographic info and
>> permission to use and stream for scholarly purposes.
> I'm not sure what you're saying here. It sounds as if you're talking
> about automated correspondence with the sources. That would be a huge
> project in itself, so I assume you've got something more narrowly
> focused in mind.
>
>> - Goes through a standard set of questions (in our case stuff about the
>> Appalachian State experience)
> There are two pieces to this: Recording the responses and storing the
> relevant metadata. The recording probably shouldn't be tied to a
> specific device or application, since field work can involve a lot of
> different conditions. The researcher in the field would want something
> to enter the metadata (who, what, when, where); this would be a
> straightforward piece.
>
>> - Stores the metadata, permissions release, and pointers to the audio
>> files created for each question in a dbase record
> You don't say what the scope of the work is; from the way you're putting
> the questions, I'm assuming it's a small-scale project with one
> researcher doing the interviews and putting the information together.
> Even so, It's probably best to have the field work be a separate
> application from assembling the information in the database. If nothing
> else, once you're at this point there's more standard software that can
> be used.
>
>> - Processes the audio through speech recognition either in real time or
>> post-interview, and populates the dbase record with rendered text (at
>> whatever level of accuracy)
> You could do this piece with Dragon; see this post for some discussion:
>
> http://www.nuance.com/dragon/transcription-solutions/index.htm
>
> A friend of mine is an expert in this area and might be able to answer
> some questions.
>
>> - Provide a search interface, where the meatadata, demographic info
>> (within reasonable privacy limits), and the transcript (however garbled)
>> is searchable.
> I'd suggest basing something on Apache Lucene.
>
>> - Crowd source the improvement of the transcriptions over time
> This needs to be better specified. One solution is to put the text onto
> a wiki. If you're talking about integrating it into the application that
> does all the rest, it could get messy.
>
>> - Package the interface as an app, and set up a machine image on Amazon
>> EC2, such that when someone uses the image and points a browser to it,
>> it goes through a set up routine so that smaller schools and historical
>> societies can set up their own sites in the cloud.  I haven't tried
>> streaming on a free tier EC2 server, but you get 30 GB of storage, so
>> you could get a fair number of hours of audio (depending on the
>> settings) before you have to start paying.
> This, I assume, is why you're talking about treating the whole thing as
> a single application. Putting it all together would be a huge chunk of
> work. Dragon's software isn't free, and I don't know of anything for
> free that does decent speech transcription, so that would be a stumbling
> block to making it available to other institutions.
>> ?
>>
>> Anyone interested in trying it with me if there's nothing already out
>> there?  I'm leaning toward iPad, so we'd need iOS, server admin, dbase,
>> and media expertise.  I have newbie-but-getting-better skill in the last
>> 3.  Zero skill in iOS.
> I'm available for freelance work and it sounds very interesting, but
> you've just outlined a huge project that would be a significant burden
> even for the LoC's resources. That's not to say it can't be useful as a
> blue-sky starting point for something more reasonable. If you have
> funding, let's talk off-list. If you just want to continue blue-skying
> the idea for a while, I'm glad to continue on-list (and I promise not to
> bill you for that :).
>
>

-- 
Mark Canney
Manager, Lending Services
Lehigh University Libraries
8A E. Packer Avenue
Bethlehem, PA   18015-3170
610-758-3028
[log in to unmask]