Enhanced exploration of oral history archives through processed video and synchronized text transcripts

Abstract

A digital video library of over 900 hours of video and 18000 stories from The HistoryMakers was used by 266 students, faculty, librarians, and life-long learners interacting with a system providing multiple search and viewing capabilities over a trial period of several months. User demographics and actions were logged with this multimedia collection, providing quantitative and qualitative metrics on system use. These transaction logs were complemented with heuristic evaluation, interviews, and contextual inquiry with representative users. Collectively, these mixed methods informed the development of the next generation web-based interface for the HistoryMakers video oral histories to improve access to and dissemination of this rich cultural resource. In particular, the feature of a synchronized text transcript in the video player for the narratives merited further investigation. Such an interface has not seen widespread use in digital video players available on the web, yet was valued highly by oral history archive viewers. A user study with 27 participants measured the utility of the HistoryMakers web interface incorporating the synchronized transcript video player for stated fact-finding and open-ended tasks. For life oral histories, an aligned text transcript is valued for both tasks, with the video rated significantly more useful for open-ended tasks over fact-finding. These results suggest a task-dependent role of modality in presentation of oral histories, with synchronized transcripts rated highly across tasks.

Exploring the possibilities of Thomson’s fourth paradigm transformation—The case for a multimodal approach to digital oral history?

“…Information retrieval for improving access to OH collections remains a foundational approach, such as through indexing (Boyd, 2013;Gref et al, 2018), segmentation (Gustman et al, 2002), and the use of ASR and machine learning to make recordings searchable (Salesky et al, 2016). The use of video has also been strongly tied to promoting greater Digital oral history towards a new research paradigm engagement with OH archives, and as an enhancement to access and 'digital storytelling', including in education (Christel et al, 2010;High, 2010;Kaufman, 2013;Gould and Gradowski, 2014). Most of the literature surveyed on the use of digital methods for analysing OH or spoken word collections focuses on various text-based analyses such as social network analysis and text-mining (McKether et al, 2009;Verd andLozares, 2014, McKether andFriese, 2016;O'Reagan and Fleming, 2018), semantic networking (Pattuelli and Miller, 2015), topic modelling and tagging, and datavisualization (Ohno et al, 2010;Paju et al, 2011;Xiao et al, 2013).…”

Multimedia

“…The HistoryMakers is an African American oral history archive using speech alignment, image processing, and language understanding technologies to promote multiple levels of access to fuel the viewing of the actual video recordings in a large oral history corpus [2]. Tens of thousands of stories are accessible in oral histories processed through Informedia technologies at thehistorymakers.com and www.idvl.org.…”

An interactive flash website for oral histories

“…The time-aligned transcript makes the video more accessible [2] and offers potential to keep users on-site longer in support of exploratory search [1]. The locations of matching areas following a query are represented on the video timeline, with button access to quickly jump forward and back through match areas.…”