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Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives

Interest has grown in recent years in in oral history along with the increased popularity of the personal narrative. Oral history can be defined as the practice of eliciting people’s personal memory of lived experiences that are absent in written archives, and documenting them with a recording device with the purpose of turning the interviews into historical sources.

The ‘digital turn’ has had an enormous impact on this archival practice. Currently much unique and valuable spoken language data reside in oral history archives, in the form of digital audio and video, written transcripts and non-digitized recordings. Speech and language technologists have developed various software tools and platforms for the analysis and exploration of the various layers of meaning in spoken data. But despite the large amount of research carried out in numerous disciplines to create, explore and analyse oral history data, the state of the art software is often not exploited by researchers in the humanities and the social sciences. At the same time oral history data is rather underused by linguists.

CLARIN organized a workshop to bring together those doing research on oral history archive data, including archivists, language technologists, social scientists, along with linguists and speech technologists to investigate how these various communities might start to learn from each other and collaborate more effectively.

# Episode Title Description People Date
13 Creative Commons From Search to Exploration Barriers and opportunities in using oral history archives as data resources Jakub Mlynář 16 May 2016
12 Creative Commons Oral History as Research Data Interviews, collections, archives, data and history - a view from the UK Data Archive. Louise Corti 16 May 2016
11 Creative Commons Oral History Collections How to exploit the multidisciplinary potential of Oral History narratives Stef Scagliola 16 May 2016
10 Creative Commons CLARIN Data, Services and Tools What language technologies are available that might help process, analyse and explore oral history collections? Dieter van Uytvanck 16 May 2016
9 Creative Commons Increasing the Impact of Oral History Data with Human Language Technologies How CLARIN is already helping researchers Arjan van Hessen 16 May 2016
8 Creative Commons Language Technologies: ELAN A short introduction to the ELAN annotation and processing suite of tools Sebastian Drude 16 May 2016
7 Creative Commons Language Technologies: INTER-VIEWS A Search and Annotation Tool for Oral History Henk van den Heuvel 16 May 2016
6 Creative Commons Oral Histories of Hidden Children in Denmark during the Holocaust Narratives, Identity and Trauma Sofie Lene Bak 16 May 2016
5 Creative Commons Building an open sound archive The case of the Grammo-foni (Gra.fo) project Silvia Calamai 16 May 2016
4 Creative Commons Using forced alignment and HTML5 media syntax to share speech archive data Powerful language technology tools and methods to support oral history research John Coleman 16 May 2016
3 Creative Commons Forced alignment using FAVE and DARLA Powerful language technology tools and methods to support oral history research Josef Fruehwald 16 May 2016
2 Creative Commons Researching Holocaust survivors in Greece through the Visual History Archive Issues and debates in the research use of testimony Kateřina Králová 16 May 2016
1 Creative Commons Testimonies on Nazi Forced Labour and the Holocaust Building Digital Environments for Research and Education Cord Pagenstecher 16 May 2016