Oral History Digital Indexing Roles

Digital Indexing work is more akin to art than science. Accordingly, breaking down the process to a series of universally applicable steps or elements is challenging.  This is both because of the nature of the work but also due to the fact that every project we work on is different. Our clients’ placement on the digital spectrum varies--ranging from brand new oral history projects where not a single recording has yet been made to well-developed projects with large amounts of digital material that need to be multi-dimensionally indexed.  Breaking projects into phases, tasks, or other elemental organizational schemes can be done, but is not necessarily the most useful organizational indexing schema for this type of content (if you know what I mean).

The indexing process can be described by the roles of the people involved. These roles described are not mutually exclusive, but they do comprehensively cover the phases of work necessary to get a project from beginning to end. The following titles for the various “roles” are conceptual only.  In some smaller projects, one or two people are taking on all of the roles. In other projects, several people may take on a single role (for example, where volunteers are organized to create annotations). These roles can be filled by people within or outside of an organization, be paid or volunteer positions, and engage highly skilled and knowledgeable people, or not.  They are presented here as a basic guideline of “who and what” is needed within an annotation/indexing project, and each role will be described in more detail in their own post.

• Interviewer
• Annotator
• Indexer/Coder
• Editor
• Producer/Publisher

Browsing vs. Searching: An "analogue" analogue

From NPR's Eulogy for a Record Store, a great quote about the merits of record store browsing:

"Browsing is a form of learning that is intense but indirect," Wieseltier says. "It's learning by osmosis, by serendipity. It's being surprised because when you browse, you don't know what you're looking for. You're not indulging in 'search.' You're basically making a bet on the richness of the world and immersing yourself in it and coming away with something that you've discovered. ... Look, we grow by discoveries. We don't grow by what we already know. But for these interventions and revelations and illuminations, we would be only what we already are. Who wants to be that?"

Special thanks to http://www.hussalonia.com/ for pointing out this link!

“Inliteration”

It seems I’m getting behind on my posts…. Or actually, it seems I was getting ahead of myself.

I want to talk about a concept I’ve been dabbling with for a couple of years. I call it “inliteration”. It’s a word I made up to capture the essence of what it means to make up a word. Inliteration is similar to “incarnation”, except instead of meaning to become “embodied” in a thing that is physical, it limited to taking form as words.

Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition(s) of incarnation:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incarnation

So to parallel those definitions, I propose:

Inliteration

1a (1): the embodiment of a deity or spirit in a word or group of words in human language (2): the union of concept with language analogous to the union of divinity with humanity in Christianity b: a quality or concept definable as a word or group of words

2: the act of inliterating: the state of being inliterated

3: language

This is a cut at a definition… enough, I think, to be able to refer to it for other discussions. I’ve found it a handy word to have in conversation with a small group of friends who talk about library science, indexing, and life philosophy in general.

"Indocumentation" as the essense of Oral History

Digital Indexing enhances oral history collections that otherwise cannot be easily accessed. We often use a “shoebox” metaphor to emphasize the importance of indexing: A collection of digital audio or video that is not indexed is in a digital shoebox, which is not much better than a real shoebox of un-digitized cassette or video tapes forgotten in a closet somewhere. By annotating and indexing discrete passages of audio/video, we create access to collections that would otherwise be cumbersome if not impossible to make use of.

Today, I want to take a moment to talk about the recording: The recording itself not only provides “access” to some living memory because it is in a re-playable medium, but it is a form of documentation. It occurs to me that the creation of new documentation is the essential element that makes recorded interviews so powerful. The moment things take documentary form—whether and email, an oral history recording, or even a produced documentary film—is when they have the potential to become part of a larger discourse. This moment of incarnation, or perhaps “indocumentation,” is where ideas become things we can really talk about, but also do something about…

Locative Metadata

When we index at Randforce, we develop controlled vocabularies (also known as thesauri) for annotated passages of audio and video. Technically, the objects we are indexing are metadata themselves. (Thus we create meta-metadata!) For discussion purposes, the objects we are indexing are a/v clips.

We often conceptualize the process of indexing to be less like "labeling" something (i.e., what is it called?) and more like "putting it somewhere" (i.e., where does it belong?) and we sometimes call this "sorting the laundry." The proverbial laundry baskets are created by us indexers and the objects influence its creation in a meaningful way. It seems to me, that when these terms are fed back to the object, they are a unique type of metadata.

I'd like to propose that this type of metadata being created might be called "locative metadata". Locative metadata, conceptually, is more than an attribute of the object. Locative metadata implies "where it is" relative to other objects in the collection, not just what it is about. Locative metadata might also be a purely digital concept exactly because an object can reside in more than one location at a time (without needing to take up additional space). In this sense, library subject headings--from the book's perspective--is locative metadata, as are hyperlinks to an object from the objects' perspective.

Launching a New Tab.. Tip of the Day

This post may not be about oral history content management, but is certainly topical (for me, today). If you are putting links in your blog, remember to double check that your off-site links open a new tab or window, so that the page being read remains readily available. You can do this by adding a small piece of code.

So if I link to another post in my blog, I will just assume that readers will find their way back here and I won't burden them with an extra tab...

Read an earlier post! (And see you later!)

However...

If I'm sending them away, like to this YouTube video...

Watch this YouTube Video!

I'm going to wait here for them in the old tab. In the latter link, I added target="_blank" next to href="http://www...." in the Html just before "Watch this YouTube Video". Now we know.

Anecdata: Oral History Methods in the Sciences

[The following is the abstract I just submitted for the Oral History Association conference in Cleveland in October. If you haven't gotten your abstract in, today is the last day...]

Anecdata: Oral History Methods in the Sciences

Although oral history is increasingly accepted as valid form of evidence, it is still a foreign concept in the the sciences. Yet all the arguments Portelli makes for "what makes oral history different" must not apply only to the humanities. This is especially true now, as digital tools allow for more direct and robust indexing of recordings. In the study of Ecological Restoration (ER), researchers are trying to understand complex problems with limited data. Even where advanced theory and modeling has been established, there are gaps in knowledge and a lack of input amongst all relevant stakeholders. Through a partnership with members of the Ecosystem Restoration through Interdisciplinary Exchange (ERIE) Program at the University at Buffalo, we are exploring the use oral histories to evaluate ER projects in terms of the human values driving them. We are applying methods of annotation and theme mapping used in our oral history practice to the open-ended recorded interviews of ER practitioners. In this paper, we will discuss how use of a database approach to content management not only serves as a means of efficient access to oral history collections, but also turn anecdotes literally into data.