Pop Up Archive: Standardized Preservation and Distribution of Culturally Significant Audio

Pop Up Archive is a simple system to preserve audio content by making it searchable, reusable, and shareable in ways that are meaningful to scholars and producers. The Kitchen Sisters inspired and collaborated on the initial phase of the project, which entailed an academic survey of existing methods for storage of and access to audio content, as well as the alpha release of software plug-ins for Omeka. Phase two of the project, for which we are seeking a Level II Start-Up Grant, will finalize and test these plug-ins across public media organizations and oral history archives, create a centralized repository of audio records, and educate relevant communities through a shared web space. The system will be open source and will conform to national archival standards, without requiring technical expertise from participating organizations. For the first time, content can be indexed for safe and permanent preservation and made accessible to producers, scholars, students, and the public

CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version

The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action). This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events. The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search. A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009

Pop Up Archive: Saving culturally significant audio through preservation, searchability, and distribution

Pop Up Archive is a set of web-based tools that make audio searchable and reusable for scholars, journalists, and the public through speech-to-text and keyword extraction software. Pop Up Archive unites audio recordings and voices from disparate places and eras, diving deep into our nation’s rich oral history. We seek to scale Pop Up Archive across U.S. recorded sound collections by implementing a transcription toolkit developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation, processing over 30,000 hours of digital sound from public media and oral history archives, and educating these communities on best practices for preserving and creating access to digital sound. Pop Up Archive is open source, conforms to archival standards, and requires no technical expertise of participating organizations. For the first time, digital sounds can be automatically searched to the timestamp, contextualized with topic headings, and indexed for safe and permanent backup preservation at the Internet Archive

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Future prospects of research on prosody: the need for publicly available corpora. Comments on Margret Selting: "Prosody in interaction: State of the art"

In her overview, Margret Selting makes the case for the claim that dealing with authentic conversation necessarily lies at the heart of an interactionallinguistic approach to prosody (see Selting this volume, Section 3.3). However, collecting and transcribing corpora of authentic interaction is a time-consuming enterprise. This fact often severely restricts what the individual researcher is able to do in terms of analysis within the scope of his or her resources. Still, for dealing with many of the desiderata Margret Selting points out in Section 5 of her extensive overview, the use of larger corpora seems to be required. In this commenting paper, I want to argue that future progress in research on prosody in interaction will essentially rest on the availability and use of large public corpora. After reviewing arguments for and against the use of public corpora, I will discuss some upshots regarding corpus design and issues of transcription of public corpora

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research