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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]