Oral History & Technology - München workshop

Background

Over the past 2 years a number of researchers from various backgrounds have been working on the exploitation of digital techniques and tools for working with oral history (OH) data. These endeavours have been supported by CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) as this European infrastructure for harmonizing and sharing data and tools for linguists, aims at broadening its audience, for example, to the social science community. It intends to realize this objective by reaching out to scholars who are interested in cross disciplinary approaches and who work with interviews/oral histories/qualitative data.

CLARIN is interested in how it can better support the diversity of practices among social scientists, oral historians and digital humanists. and how it can lower barriers to the use and take up of its resource and technologies. Through supporting workshops they can get researcher-oriented feedback and suggestions for refinement and improvement of its resources.

About the workshop

The third of our programme of workshops, supported by the funding program, CLARIN will be held in Munich, Germany on 19-21 September 2018, and will focus on the analysis phase of the research process. This builds on the work already done during previous workshops, in order to create automatically generated transcripts. By bringing together CLARIN technologies for speech retrieval and alignment from different countries, the ‘Transcription Chain’ has been developed, a prototype that will also be tested during the workshop.

The invitation-only workshop aims to gather of evidence on scholars' everyday practices when working with OH data. By documenting and comparing these engrained practices, and by venturing into different approaches and methods to their data, namely by using unfamiliar annotation. For the purpose of this workshop we have agreed to work with audiovisual and textual data in 4 languages: Dutch, English, German and Italian, and will have prepared some materials for participants to work with, in language groups.

There will be some preparatory work that has to be done prior to the workshop that will consist of completing a matrix of user approaches and tools for your specialty, analysing some extracts of data and reviewing some documentation that we will send in advance.  Our estimate is that this will take somewhere between 5 and 10 hours of your time and the 'homework' aims to reflect participants' various expertise that will be used in the workshop.
No specific technical knowledge is required.

All participants need to be able to commit to the full 3 days - Wednesday lunchtime on 19th September to lunchtime on Friday 21stSeptember. We are able to pay up to €275 maximum towards your economy class travel. Please ensure that your travel is booked well in advance and check with us in advance if you need to. Hotels and meals will be provided from Wednesday lunchtime to Friday lunch. We may be able to arrange pick-ups from airports if people's travel plans coincide.
 

For more information on the München workshop, please visit the Oral History & Technology website