The workshop 'Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives' was held in at the Oxford e-Research Centre on the 18th and 19th April, and brought together researchers from a number of disciplines working with oral history collections, curators of oral history materials, along with language technologists and linguists. Presentations included examples of language technology in action enhancing and searching collections, and the workshop discussions explored new opportunities, as well as curent gaps and obstacles to progress. As a result of the workshop there will be a number of ongoing activities, including:
- extending and maintaining a registry of oral history collections in Europe,
- making collections visible via the Virtual Language Observatory,
- a 'hackathon' to work on mini-projects with oral history and develop case studies of good practice,
- publishing screencast videos on how to transcribe, align and search oral collections,
- developing support services to make it easier to find and use tools in oral history research,
- development of new collaborative projects, including crowdsourcing, thematic research.
The workshop was the first in a series which will involve researchers working with a number of different types of data collections. The next one will be held in Leuven in September, and will focus on Newspaper collections, with further workshops next year on parliamentary records and social media.
Read more, including the programme and presentations from the workshop, on the workshop webpage.