Oral History & Technology

domtoren

As a follow up of the CLARIN workshop on Oral History (OH) archives in Oxford (April 2016), we have applied for funding to prepare two workshops: the first one in December 2016 in Utrecht and the second one in April 2017 in Arezzo. The proposal for these two workshops was granted in October 2016.

The envisaged outcome of the two workshops is an implementation plan for an OH transcription chain that can be integrated into the CLARIN infrastructure. Once the implementation plan is written, it will be submitted to CLARIN ERIC for funding.

The first workshop (6-7 December) in Utrecht is an "afternoon-evening-morning" workshop for a small amount of participants (<15).
Main goal of the workshop is to:

sketch the working-together process for the following 3 to 4 months
set-up a working environment (GoogleDocs?)
appoint responsabilities
find necessary colleagues/partners
find possible (CLARIN) hosts for OH transcription services for the three languages
design the "ideal transcription chain" for oral historians
sketch the organisation of the second workshop: invitees and agenda

In the months after the December workshop the people who were present (and others) will write a proposal that will be discussed, improved and finalised at the second workshop in Arezzo.

Participants

At this moment (29 November) the following persons have confirmed their availability at the workshop.

Name	Country	Affiliation	Expertise
Silvia Calamai	IT	Dipartimento di Scienze della formazione, scienze umane e della comunicazione interculturale	Linguistics
Riccardo del Gratta	IT	ILC	Infrastructure
Stef Scagliola	LU	Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences Humaines, des Arts et des Sciences de l'Education	Oral History
Martin Wynne	UK	IT Services, Oxford Text Archive
John Coleman	UK	Phonetics Laboratory	Phonetics
Henk van den Heuvel	NL	CLST, Radboud University	Language and Speech Technology
Arjan van Hessen	NL	HMI, University of Twente	Language and Speech Technology
Parttime Participants
Roeland Ordelman	NL	Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision	Language and Speech Technology
René van Horik	NL	DANS	Infrastructures
Oana Inel	NL	VUA	Computer Science
Leon Wessels	NL	CLARIN-EU	Infrastructure
Willemien Sanders	NL	CLARIN-EU	OH
Norah Karrouche	NL	CLARIAH - WP5	OH

Location & Agenda

The workshop started 6 December at 12:30 and finished 7 December at 13:00.

The location of the meeting was the modern SURF-building in Utrecht. The SURF-building is (more or less) in the railway station. Walking from and to the trains to Amsterdam Airport is less than 10 minutes. Also the historical centre of Utrecht (Dom tower) is less than 10 minutes by foot.

Tuesday 6 December 2016

Time	Activity	Moderator
12:30	Lunch	Arjan van Hessen
13:30	Intro: Goals of the project, goals of this workshop	Henk van den Heuvel
13:50	Oxford and beyond	Willemien Sanders
14:10	Make inventory of relevant decisions for successful transcription chain (the "ideal transcription chain" for Oral Historians) Topics to address: Advices regarding AD-conversion, including audio formats KALDI ASR engines for the three languages Output formats and conversion Transcription guidelines Manual transcription correction via crowdsourcing platforms Which platforms in which countries Re-aligning speech and transcripts after manual transcription Which alignment services Metadata profiles, formats, languages	Arjan, All
15:30	Tea & Coffee
15:45	Crowdsourcing issues: Crowdtruth	Oana Inel
16:30	Research data management and the role of the EUDAT CDI EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure: background and status Trusted Digital Repositories for interview data Community engagement	René van Horik
17:15	(CLARIN) hosts for OH transcription services for the three languages Which CLARIN centres ? Three for each language or one for all languages? Restrict access to OH participants? Preliminary? Data storage of interviews Costs for using the services and data storage	Roeland Ordelman
18:00	Sketch the working-together process for the following 3 to 4 months Set-up a working environment (GoogleDocs?)	All
19:00	Dinner at Sir/Signore/Meneer Buscourr

Wednesday 7 December

Time	Activity	Moderator
9:30	Sketch the working-together process for the following 3 to 4 months (cont’d) Appoint responsibilities / actionpoint holders	Henk, Arjan
10:30	Coffee & Tea	All
10:45	Design agenda for the Arezzo meeting	All
11:30	Set-up list of invitees for the Arezzo meeting (using the participants list of the meeting in Oxford)	All
12:30	Lunch
13:30	Adjourn

Blog report

A Short Report of the workshop "The Oral History Transcriptions Chain"

Pre-history

At a general CLARIN-Oral History workshop held in Oxford in April 2016, a number of conclusions could be drawn:

There is a growing interest from different CLARIN member-countries to use modern Human Language Technology for opening up Oral History data in archives that has not been transcribed, and for speeding up the process of creating transcripts from one’s own interviews.
An infrastructure containing both the tools to perform these tasks and storage to stimulate the reuse of the transcripts, that requires no extensive knowledge of ICT by its users, is very much desired.
The accessibility of OH collections in the participating counties is widely divergent. Some have a national infrastructure with storage centres, and online catalogues with extensive metadata, on digitized content, others have vast amounts of OH collections but only in their original analogue format.

As digitalisation of analogue recordings is becoming increasingly easier, storage is affordable, and HLT performs well enough to be applied on data with speech that is clear and understandable, it was decided to explore the possibilities to create such an infrastructure.

The first call in CLARIN (EU) was used to propose two preparatory workshops one in Utrecht which was just held, and one in Arezzo in April 2017, that should lead to a concrete proposal for an infrastructure that facilitates the entire process of opening up of oral history data,: from digitisation to transcription, making use of automatic speech recognition as intermediary technology.

Targets in Utrecht

Werk The goal of the workshop in Utrecht was setting up a workflow and division of tasks to perform in the next four months, and that will be finalized in Arezzo, :

What are the tasks that have to be covered to create the proposal?
Who will be responsible for the content of each part of the proposal ?
Who are the co-authors of each topic?
What infrastructure will be used to describe the topics (snap ik niet)
Setting the deadlines for the tasks
Envision the program for Arezzo, (who to invite, what kind of activities to organize)
What should be the follow up of Arezzo?

Day 1

At the end of the morning of December 6th, the foreign guests from England (Martin Wynn) and Italy (Silvia Calamai & Riccardo del Gratta) arrived together with the Dutch participants (die ook noemen) at the SURF-offices in Utrecht. At 13:30 Henk van den Heuvel welcomed everybody, and explained the goals of the workshops and of the proposal to be realised in spring 2017.

After which, Willemien Sanders, currently involved in the follow-up of the Oxford-workshop on behalf of Clarin EU, gave a short overview of what action points had been formulated in achieved in Oxford.

This was followed by Henk van den Heuvel’s presentation of the envisioned time table, as shown below.

Time scheme for the period between the two workshops

Table with workpackages and responsibles

The outcome of this discussion was that 8 tasks were formulated for the various building blocks of the envisaged transcription chain:

Topic	Responsible	Co-writers
AD & DD conversion	Arjan	John
ASR	Henk	Louis ten Bosch, Arjan,Stef, Maurizio Omologo, Piero Cosi, Francesco Cutugno, Sergio Grau Puerto
Transcription correction
- General	Arjan	Stef
- Crowdsourcing	Oana	Arjan
Transcription Guidelines	Stef	Silvia, Louise
Alignment	John	Silvia, Arjan
Metadata	Stef	Dieter van Uytvanck (technical), Silvia (metadata selection)
Export	Tba
Hosting	NL: René UK: Martin IT: Riccardo	NL: Roeland (NSIV, UTwente) UK: Thomas Hain (Sheffield), John (Computer Cluster, Oxford) IT: Silvia (Arezzo/Siena)
Overview of the task and the people working on them

After the coffee break three interesting presentations were held by:

Rene van Horik (DANS) about potential data hosting via EUDat.
Oana Inel (VU) on the Crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower. Oana showed us how easy it is to setup a Crowdsourcing environment where "other" people (you do not know them), can help you with the correction of transcriptions (made by humans or machines). A small example of a 1-minute audio segemnt and the accompanying transcription can be seen here (un/pw = /crowdtruth).
Roeland Ordelman (NISV) who offered an overview of similar activities for a transctiption service as part of the WP5-workpackage of the infrastructure program CLARIAH

The first day was ended with a nice diner at Mr. Buscourr

Day 2

rome arezzo pisa The second day was mainly focused on the organisation of the Arezzo-workshop: when, where, who, what?

Because Arezzo does not has an airport, visitors need to fly to Pisa, Firenze or Rome and than take the train to Arezzo (additional 1 to 2½ hour extra travel time).
So starting early in the morning or ending at the end of the afternoon is a bit problematic without an additional night. Stef and Willemien have offered to “solve” this issue.

Further, the responsibilities of the participants in terms of document writing and implementation of tasks were verified and settled.

At 12:30 this short, but very effective workshop was concluded and participants left with a list of tasks to perform in the coming 4 months ?.

Arjan & Henk

Utrecht Workshop

Participants