Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted:\ud content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the\ud metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level\ud of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken\ud word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the\ud introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents\ud an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of\ud historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the\ud so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by\ud the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II.\ud The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual\ud transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be\ud searched at the word level. Results are presented together with\ud related photos from an external database

OS ACERVOS E A DOCUMENTAÇÃO LINGUÍSTICA

This article is derived from a conference at the ABRALIN ao vivo, held online, in 2020. The goal is to discuss the benefits and challenges associated with archiving in language documentation considering our accumulated knowledge as scholars who are deeply involved in administering, contributing to, and drawing on language archives, with an emphasis on the indigenous languages of Latin America. We focus in particular on the relevance of language archiving in Brazil, and its significance for scholars, community members, and other stakeholders.Este artigo é oriundo de uma conferência na ABRALIN ao vivo, realizada online, em 2020. O objetivo é discutir os benefícios e desafios associados à documentação e criação de acervos linguísticos considerando nosso conhecimento acumulado como pesquisadores profundamente envolvidos na administração e manutenção de acervos de línguas, com ênfase nas línguas indígenas da América Latina. Focamos na relevância de acervos linguísticos no Brasil e sua importância para a comunidade acadêmica, membros de comunidades indígenas e outras partes interessadas

The Digital Humanities Imperative: An Archival Response

The authors offer a look at how as archivists at the Maine Folklife Center they are using new digital tools to both preserve historical resources and improve public access to them

Long-Term Preservation of Digital Records, Part I: A Theoretical Basis

The Information Revolution is making preservation of digital records an urgent issue. Archivists have grappled with the question of how to achieve this for about 15 years. We focus on limitations to preservation, identifying precisely what can be preserved and what cannot. Our answer comes from the philosophical theory of knowledge, especially its discussion about the limits of what can be communicated. Philosophers have taught that answers to critical questions have been obscured by "failure to understand the logic of our language". We can clarify difficulties by paying extremely close attention to the meaning of words such as 'knowledge', 'information', 'the original', and 'dynamic'. What is valuable in transmitted and stored messages, and what should be preserved, is an abstraction, the pattern inherent in each transmitted and stored digital record. This answer has, in fact, been lurking just below the surface of archival literature. To make progress, archivists must collaborate with software engineers. Understanding perspectives across disciplinary boundaries will be needed.

Digitization Guidelines for Static & Non-static (Audiovisual) Media: Compliance & Challenges in Academic Libraries

This doctoral dissertation aims to explore digitization practices at academic libraries in the United States. It examines adopted digitization guidelines, levels of compliance with these guidelines, challenges, and solutions. It seeks answers to five research questions in relation to academic libraries’ compliance with static and non-static (audiovisual) media digitization guidelines, encountered challenges, and applied solutions. A mixed methods explanatory research design was adopted for this comparative study. Purposive sampling was applied. The study sample consisted of 68 subjects from doctoral universities with highest and higher research activity based on the 2015 classification issued by The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered through three collection methods: document analysis, electronic questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. Document analysis was conducted for five sets of digitization guidelines (i.e., ALCTS, BCR’s CDP Digital Imaging Best Practices Working Group, CARLI, FADGI, and NARA), wherein one (i.e., CARLI) consisted of five documents. Open coding was applied to explore themes in qualitative data collected by the electronic questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test was applied to examine differences between digitization of static and non-static (audiovisual) media regarding challenges, levels of compliance, availability, and usefulness. The Paired Samples Test was applied only for sets of quantitative data that have normal distribution. Findings revealed differences in the adoption of digitization guidelines for digitizing static and non-static (audiovisual) media. Consistency, Standardization, and Sustainability was the most frequent type of reason for compliance with digitization guidelines adopted for static and non-static (audiovisual) media. Planning and Workflow was the most frequent type of reason for not complying with digitization guidelines adopted for static media, whereas Hardware was the most frequent type of reason for not complying with digitization guidelines for non-static (audiovisual) media. Statistical analyses revealed no significant differences in levels of compliance, availability, and usefulness between static and non-static (audiovisual) media among ALCTS, consortium/consortia, and a university’s own customized digitization guidelines. Open coding indicated that Funding and Hardware challenges appeared among the three most frequent types of challenges for static and non-static (audiovisual) media. The Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Tests revealed significant differences (with the exception of external funding) between digitization of static and non-static (audiovisual) media in terms of budget, digitization equipment/hardware, digitization software, staff digitization skills, and the need for more professional training. Different types of applied and suggested solutions were explored, wherein Planning and Workflow and Funding solutions were most frequent among the applied and suggested solutions for static and non-static (audiovisual) media. The theoretical implications of this study focus on digitization guidelines and compliance levels with those guidelines, and digitization challenges. Practical implications aim to provide suggestions to enhance development of digitization guidelines, and to reduce the effect of challenges faced in digitizing static and non-static (audiovisual) media

Findings from the Workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives

This white paper describes findings from the workshop on User-Centered Design of Language Archives organized in February 2016 by Christina Wasson (University of North Texas) and Gary Holton (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa). It reviews relevant aspects of language archiving and user-centered design to construct the rationale for the workshop, relates key insights produced during the workshop, and outlines next steps in the larger research trajectory initiated by this workshop. The purpose of this white paper is to make all of the findings from the workshop publicly available in a short time frame, and without the constraints of a journal article concerning length, audience, format, and so forth. Selections from this white paper will be used in subsequent journal articles. So much was learned during the workshop; we wanted to provide a thorough documentation to ensure that none of the key insights would be lost. We consider this document a white paper because it provides the foundational insights and initial conceptual frameworks that will guide us in our further research on the user-centered design of language archives. We hope this report will be useful to members of all stakeholder groups seeking to develop user-centered designs for language archives.U.S. National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages Program grants BCS-1543763 and BCS-1543828

Teachers’ Tales Go Online: Digitizing Oral Histories on Cassettes

For a time beginning in the 1970s, cassette tapes were very popular for recording oral histories. Today, these cassettes have exceeded their expected lifespan. Photographs, newspapers, and yearbooks fill many online repositories, but libraries and archives may find themselves wondering how to digitize an audio collection. This article presents a case study of one librarian’s effort to run a pilot digitization project for twenty-one oral history cassettes

Alcohol Language Corpus

The Alcohol Language Corpus (ALC) is the first publicly available speech corpus comprising intoxicated and sober speech of 162 female and male German speakers. Recordings are done in the automotive environment to allow for the development of automatic alcohol detection and to ensure a consistent acoustic environment for the alcoholized and the sober recording. The recorded speech covers a variety of contents and speech styles. Breath and blood alcohol concentration measurements are provided for all speakers. A transcription according to SpeechDat/Verbmobil standards and disfluency tagging as well as an automatic phonetic segmentation are part of the corpus. An Emu version of ALC allows easy access to basic speech parameters as well as the us of R for statistical analysis of selected parts of ALC. ALC is available without restriction for scientific or commercial use at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals

Reflections on software and technology for language documentation

Technological developments in the last decades enabled an unprecedented growth in volumes and quality of collected language data. Emerging challenges include ensuring the longevity of the records, making them accessible and reusable for fellow researchers as well as for the speech communities. These records are robust research data on which verifiable claims can be based and on which future research can be built, and are the basis for revitalization of cultural practices, including language and music performance. Recording, storage and analysis technologies become more lightweight and portable, allowing language speakers to actively participate in documentation activities. This also results in growing needs for training and support, and thus more interaction and collaboration between linguists, developers and speakers. Both cutting-edge speech technologies and crowdsourcing methods can be effectively used to overcome bottlenecks between different stages of analysis. While the endeavour to develop a single all-purpose integrated workbench for documentary linguists may not be achievable, investing in robust open interchange formats that can be accessed and enriched by independent pieces of software seems more promising for the near future.National Foreign Language Resource Cente