On 10/2/12 8:44 AM, Paul Orkiszewski wrote:
Hi 4libers,
Does anyone know of something - a kiosk, an iPad app, a web application
- that:
I don't know of anything like it out there, but let's look at what it
might take. I've done some software work in connection with Harvard's
Iranian Oral History Project.
- Initiates an oral history interview by getting demographic info and
permission to use and stream for scholarly purposes.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. It sounds as if you're talking
about automated correspondence with the sources. That would be a huge
project in itself, so I assume you've got something more narrowly
focused in mind.
- Goes through a standard set of questions (in our case stuff about the
Appalachian State experience)
There are two pieces to this: Recording the responses and storing the
relevant metadata. The recording probably shouldn't be tied to a
specific device or application, since field work can involve a lot of
different conditions. The researcher in the field would want something
to enter the metadata (who, what, when, where); this would be a
straightforward piece.
- Stores the metadata, permissions release, and pointers to the audio
files created for each question in a dbase record
You don't say what the scope of the work is; from the way you're putting
the questions, I'm assuming it's a small-scale project with one
researcher doing the interviews and putting the information together.
Even so, It's probably best to have the field work be a separate
application from assembling the information in the database. If nothing
else, once you're at this point there's more standard software that can
be used.
- Processes the audio through speech recognition either in real time or
post-interview, and populates the dbase record with rendered text (at
whatever level of accuracy)
You could do this piece with Dragon; see this post for some discussion:
http://www.nuance.com/dragon/transcription-solutions/index.htm
A friend of mine is an expert in this area and might be able to answer
some questions.
- Provide a search interface, where the meatadata, demographic info
(within reasonable privacy limits), and the transcript (however garbled)
is searchable.
I'd suggest basing something on Apache Lucene.
- Crowd source the improvement of the transcriptions over time
This needs to be better specified. One solution is to put the text onto
a wiki. If you're talking about integrating it into the application that
does all the rest, it could get messy.
- Package the interface as an app, and set up a machine image on Amazon
EC2, such that when someone uses the image and points a browser to it,
it goes through a set up routine so that smaller schools and historical
societies can set up their own sites in the cloud. I haven't tried
streaming on a free tier EC2 server, but you get 30 GB of storage, so
you could get a fair number of hours of audio (depending on the
settings) before you have to start paying.
This, I assume, is why you're talking about treating the whole thing as
a single application. Putting it all together would be a huge chunk of
work. Dragon's software isn't free, and I don't know of anything for
free that does decent speech transcription, so that would be a stumbling
block to making it available to other institutions.
?
Anyone interested in trying it with me if there's nothing already out
there? I'm leaning toward iPad, so we'd need iOS, server admin, dbase,
and media expertise. I have newbie-but-getting-better skill in the last
3. Zero skill in iOS.
I'm available for freelance work and it sounds very interesting, but
you've just outlined a huge project that would be a significant burden
even for the LoC's resources. That's not to say it can't be useful as a
blue-sky starting point for something more reasonable. If you have
funding, let's talk off-list. If you just want to continue blue-skying
the idea for a while, I'm glad to continue on-list (and I promise not to
bill you for that :).
