Oral History Today - Search Interface for Oral History Research
Presented at CLARIAH meeting 11 September 2013 by Roeland Ordelman (NISV) and Max Kemman (EUR)
Slides in Dutch, slide notes in English
12. CLARIAH PRESENTATIE 11 September 2013 12
1. Exploratie en selectie
2. Onderzoek binnen selectie
3. Presentatie van resultaten
4. Data curatie
AANSLUITEN BIJ DE PRAKTIJK
14. CLARIAH PRESENTATIE 11 September 2013 14
Zoekresultaten filteren via
facetten, oa:
• Spatieel en temporeel
• Media type
• Beschikbaarheid (open-restrict)
• Metadata type
SELECTIE
Verfijnen
20. Scenario
• Vrouwelijke
onderzoeker
• 47 jaar oud
• Indonesië, migratie, oor
log & conflict
• Nog niet heel bekend
met OH collecties
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45. Reacties
• “Oral History is altijd een totaal
ontoegankelijke bron geweest -- dat is nu wel
veranderd” – historicus Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
• “Dit is een goede benadering voor doorzoeken
van Oral History collecties” – Oral History
onderzoekster
• “Dit is gaaf!” – sociale wetenschapper Nederlandse
Defensie Academie
CLARIAH PRESENTATIE 11 September 2013 45
46. Nu & verder met CLARIAH
• Makkelijk ontdekken en doorzoeken OH collecties
• Verbanden vinden tussen OH collecties
• Aan de slag gaan met OH data
• Beheer van OHT borgen
• Uitbreiden collecties
• Verbeteren/verrijken metadata
• Workspace verder uitwerken
CLARIAH PRESENTATIE 11 September 2013 46
47. CLARIAH PRESENTATIE 11 September 2013 47
Max Kemman Stef Scagliola Franciska de Jong Willem Melder Roeland Ordelman
Wouter Alink Roberto Cornacchia Bart de Goede Justin van Wees Arjan van Hessen
Hinweis der Redaktion
Presentation by Roeland Ordelman (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) and Max Kemman (Erasmus University Rotterdam) at CLARIAH meeting 11 September 2013
Oral History data is like a sea full of content
But, we need tools to cover up the gems from this sea
In CLARIAH, we sail towards a durable infrastructure for Oral History research
So far, efforts have been made with the VerteldVerleden platform
Why do we need to preserve Oral History? First, because Oral History provides ego-documents for the future
Second, witnesses of major 20th century events will be lost after the next decade
But, preserving and providing access to this material is a challenge
With technological advances, we can overcome these challenges
But, to be really usable, technological engineers and scholars in the humanities need to collaborate
By collaborating, humanities scholars can provide feedback on technological advances, and engineers can better accommodate the needs of potential users
Then, technological tools to provide access to Oral History content can align with practices of potential usersIn the Oral History Today project, we focused on two stages of scholarly research: 1) exploration and selection, and 2) research of that selection
Some highlights:The OHT (Oral History Today) search system allows exploration by collection, by keywords, and search through a search box
With facets, search results can be refined
Search results can be visualized according to facets to provide an overview of the material found. Mainly helpful for more visually-oriented searchers
Relations can be found between different collections
Interviews can be bookmarked and annotated at the interview- and fragment-level
These bookmarks and annotations can be shared with peers and for enhanced publications
To demonstrate the interface, we present the character Sandra. For Oral History Today we interviewed 15 scholars in the Humanities, Sandra’s characteristics are a summary of the group of scholars we interviewed.Mainly important is that though Sandra is interested, she is not too knowledgeable of Oral History collections and has not used these before for research
The landing page allows for exploring by collection or searching directly for terms.A word cloud provides an overview of topics available
Sandra searches for migration indonesia, her topic of research, and finds 903 results
To gain a better overview of material available, she creates a visualization
The word cloud provides an overview of topics available in the search results. She can focus on geboorteplaats (birthplace), tongar, jakarta, ambon, etc. She thus has many possibilities for exploration at her disposal
For now, she chooses a single path for exploration. She chooses to select Ambon, which prioritizes the search results with “Ambon” and brings those search results to the top
However, she still has 903 search results, she can make this smaller by refining with the facets (on the left)
She can also visualize these facets to gain an overview of all search results. She can for example quickly see that most search results are from a single collection
She decide to refine the search results by the spatial coverage and chooses Ambon
She now has 30 search results left, and a different word cloud which shows topics of moluccans, world war 2, repatriation and civil war
She selects the topic civil war to prioritize this topic and rank the search results accordingly
She can now view the search results and finds many male perspectives on war and Ambon
As she’s also interested in female perspectives, she looks at collections and finds a collections with female interviews. She refines the search results to only show these female and sees two interviews she can watch immediately
She can watch the interview
And see more metadata about the topics. Moreover, there is a word cloud on the interview-level giving an overview of what the interview is about. For interviews with speech-recognition, this word cloud also shows topics extracted through speech recognition
She can find links to other collections by looking at the summaries of related interviews
Interesting bits and pieces from the interview can be bookmarked and annotated, she saves this in her workspace
Where needed, she can directly jump to the original archive where the interview is preserved
Having bookmarked the interesting bits, she can now look at the other search results
As she has little time left for now, she can bookmark search results and annotate these for later analysis
When the interview is not available within the OHT search interface, a link it provided to the original archive where the interview is preserved
Her bookmarks are kept in separate workspaces, allowing multiple projects
This workspace on Ambon women shows several fragments and interviews. She can publish this workspace to share it with peers or provide it together with a publication
When she returns to the OHT interface later, she can retrieve her query history, so she can continue where she was left
Evaluation with scholars was generally positive. Scholars saw the potential of exploring Oral History collections
Several challenges were overcome, but new challenges will need to be addressed in future projects