Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives

Building Digital Environments for Research and Education Presentation by Cord Pagenstecher from the Centre for Digital Systems, Freie Universität Berlin, at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

Issues and debates in the research use of testimony Presentation by Kateřina Králová from Charles University in Prague at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

Powerful language technology tools and methods to support oral history research Presentation by Josef Fruehwald of the University of Edinburgh at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

Powerful language technology tools and methods to support oral history research Presentation by John Coleman of the University of Oxford at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

The case of the Grammo-foni (Gra.fo) project Presentation by Silvia Calamai from the University of Siena at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

Narratives, Identity and Trauma Presentation by Sofie Lene Bak from the Unviersity of Copenhagen at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

A Search and Annotation Tool for Oral History Presentation by Henk van den Heuvel from Radboud University, Nijmegen, at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

A short introduction to the ELAN annotation and processing suite of tools Presentation from Sebastian Drude from CLARIN at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

How CLARIN is already helping researchers Presentation from Arjan van Hessen of the University of Utrecht at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

What language technologies are available that might help process, analyse and explore oral history collections? Presentation by Dieter van Uytvanck of CLARIN at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

How to exploit the multidisciplinary potential of Oral History narratives Presentation from Stef Scagliola of Erasmus University Rotterdam at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford, on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu). Elicited personal spoken narratives have a physical dimension - pressure waves traveling through the air between two speakers - and a semantic dimension - memories and self representations that are woven into a co-created story. The story can be suited for scholarly use or reuse and for a variety of purposes. It may contain references to facts that are omitted from written sources, it can shed light on coping mechanisms to overcome adversity, but it can also offer insights in the structure of dialogue, the relation between vocal and facial expression and gender-related aspects of language use. Progress in digital technology has transformed the oral history landscape. Before the ‘digital revolution’, the only viable way to access and analyse this type of data was through its textual representation: printed catalogues and transcripts. Nowadays, a considerable number of the vast array of oral history collections that have been created worldwide since the introduction of cheap recording technology in the 1960’s, is available online. Individual researchers are increasingly encouraged to deposit their interviews after completion of their research, so that other scholars can reuse them. This has yielded a huge potential of useful data for multiple academic audiences. The question is how digital tools created to support humanities research in general, can be tailored to extract the characteristic features of personal narratives in ways that match specific methodologies of diverse disciplines. In other words, how can innovation in computer science support the exploitation of this multilayered type of data and bring about innovation in cross-disciplinary scholarly research? Search technology has provided new frameworks that facilitates interaction with the data at various semantic levels. Progress can also be observed with regard to manual annotation tools. But when it comes to the next stage of the research process, the analysis of data, the bottle neck for wide-scale reuse of oral history remains the lack of transcripts, because of the dependency on the labour-intensive process of manual transcription. How to set the agenda for collaboration between developers and the various scholarly communities that want to use oral history material as research data?

Interviews, collections, archives, data and history - a view from the UK Data Archive. Louise Corti from the UK Data Archive, at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).

Barriers and opportunities in using oral history archives as data resources Opening keynote presentation from Jakub Mlynář from the Centre for Visual History Malach in Prague at the event "Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives", held at the e-Research Centre, University of Oxford on 18-19 April 2016, organized by Martin Wynne as part of the CLARIN-PLUS project (http://www.clarin.eu).