oral history – Digital History Methods

March 26, 2022

Reading Responses: Mobile Media, Place, and Mapping

This week’s readings blended theoretical approaches to the study of space and place with the technological tools that have been developed over the last few decades. This blend of the theoretical and practical can help those within the fields of history, museum studies, anthropology, etc., better understand individual and communal relationships with their surrounding environs. The readings, though each had a distinct focus or a specified case study, informed each other in significant ways, allowing for a layering of information and comprehension on my part (although when anything too tech-y appeared, my comprehension flew out the window). Here, I will give a brief overview of the readings and then provide a few discussion questions for each work.

New App City–Durington & Collins

This article emphasizes an anthropological approach to studying place and space through the lens of the “Chongno Alleys” app. This app was created by the District Government of Chongno, in Seoul, Korea, with the hope of “highlighting lesser known places of interest in Chongno.” The app allows tourists to this region of Seoul to step away from the stereotypical tourists locations and leads them towards a more authentic tour of the region, focusing on significant trees, local coffee shops, smaller art galleries, and student murals. The project brought the stakeholders directly into its creation by collaborating with neighborhoods and local organizations to decide which spots should be highlighted in this app’s tours. The app, perhaps indirectly, emphasized this unique tour of Chongno through its imperfect mapping tools, which often led tourists astray from the original destination. The wandering and meandering that resulted from these minor mishaps led tourists to discover even more of the district than they were expecting to. Happy little accident, as Bob Ross would say.

Durington and Collins stress the significance of apps such as Chongno Alleys for anthropological studies, and they ponder why anthropology has not yet put more stock in studying apps. They write “apps show how institutions and other powerful agents are trying to structure the meaning of cities by combining mobile media and social media through organizing embodied narrative experiences.” We’ll see this in the other readings as well: studying cities through an increased use of mapping tools and technology provides an additional layer of information about individual and communal understandings of the cities they live in, and those they visit.

Questions for New App City

How might an app like this ensure that visitors are not only seeing these lesser known locations, but also being given the proper information and context to understand the locations in relation to the city as a whole?

How does an app like this change when it is being run by a government agency versus a historical society or a museum? What are the implications of this?

Should these apps fully replace monographs and articles, or be just another tool to contextualize the information from monographs and articles?

What is the Spatial Turn? and The Spatial Turn in History–Jo Guldi

Jo Guldi’s two articles explaining the history of the Spatial Turn, and how the Spatial Turn has been understood and used in history provide another remarkable look at how the modern technology of GIS has changed our perspective of place and space. Guldi defines a turn as retrospection, and defines the spatial turn as the moment, or moments, when “scholars in history, religion, and psychology reflected on our nature as beings in space.” What is the Spatial Turn is primarily an overview of this moment, and a brief description of the roles played by GIS and mapping tools since the 1960s. The Spatial Turn in History gets more specific to the issues regarding understanding the nation in history compared to understanding the city. Landscapes have power, and Guldi proclaims that “modern history started with a landscape.” Experiencing land and landscapes as more than just spaces in the world, but rather as definite proof of a nation, and thus a national identity, has informed our modern conception of nationalism. Guldi writes “such description of the nation as a landscape contributed to persuading their [19th and 20th century authors] readers that there was indeed a nation, unified and monolithic, that reflected the process of historical change, such that the history of that nation could be written.” The spatial turn in history was naturally exacerbated by the development of modern mapping tools which allowed for such a wider grasp of one’s own national landscape and relationship with space and place, as well as that of others outside of one’s community.

Questions for The Spatial Turn

In what other ways, apart from the validation of a national identity, can the spatial turn play a significant role?

How would the spatial turn have been different had mapping tools like GIS not been invented?

A Place for Everything: Museum Collections, Technology, and the Power of Place–John Russick

Russick’s article discusses his development of the Chicago 00 project, which had the goal of implementing “historical images of Chicago into the city’s central business district via an augmented reality (AR) mobile app.” Standing on a street corner, a tourist to Chicago in 2022 could potentially bring up images on this app of what that same corner looked like thirty, fifty, ninety years ago, bringing them as close to that particular history as possible, until we perfect time travel, at least. Russick discusses how each item in the Chicago History Museum’s collections has an intimate connection with space(s). All these items originated somewhere, moved through space, and ended up somewhere else, and now Russick must find a way to give meaning to these items whether inside or outside the museum. He is dealing with both the Digital Turn and the Spatial Turn, where those who may once have visited the physical museum are now expecting to learn the information digitally, while also desiring a connection to place, and to a place’s distinct identity. Because of this complex moment, Russick has to ponder what it means to have all these physical objects in the museum, far away from their places of origin, when so much learning “increasingly occurs in a digital format.” He grapples with being neither a “technophile” nor a “technophobe,” but he also recognizes the huge influence that striking a balance could have. Implementing digital technology in the form of Augmented Reality around Chicago can increase public engagement, but it can also show the museum where their collections and information are lacking, and where they need to rely on their communities to fill those gaps in knowledge.

Questions for A Place for Everything

Using Russick’s questions, whose job is it to make collections compelling? Is it the responsibility of the curator? And if they are not compelling, do they belong in a modern museum?

How can we center justice and activism through a project like Chicago 00? How might we tackle this project in areas where the available collections are minimal, but the stories are abundant?

Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era–Mark Tebeau

Mark Tebeau takes the city as his topic once again, this time looking into the Cleveland Historical Project, “a mobile interpretive project,” and its use of oral history and sound to invoke memory, nostalgia, informal learning, and interpretation in Cleveland, Ohio. The project has amassed a huge collection of stories, and each one has been built out on Cleveland Historical’s website to include text, images, videos, location, and metadata. Tebeau writes that Cleveland Historical focused on a “dynamic curatorial process” that brought community members into the project to help reinvigorate “understandings of place and community identity.” In addition to this communal practice, Tebeau also discusses how the. project relied on the use of mobile devices to record many of the sounds of these moments “in situ.” He gives the example of “listening to Rick Calabrese recount the story of his family’s produce stand in the West Side Market, while standing in that context” and says that this experience “underscores and evokes the sensory and experiential context of the market, which remains a vibrant commercial center for individual and commercial consumers in the region.” Sounds provide greater emotional context for any historical moment, but they become even more poignant when experienced in the same places where they would have first been created. Tebeau’s article does a lovely job explaining the importance of oral history and sound to excavate the history of Cleveland, while also exploring the increased use of mobile technologies to achieve the project’s goal.

A screenshot of some “Featured Stories” from the Cleveland Historical Project’s website.

Questions for Listening to the City

How do we choose worthwhile sounds for a project like this? What makes one sound more evocative of a place’s identity than another?

For a fun personal moment, what sounds from your hometown, or from a place that is important to you, would you want to be included in a project like this?

Mobile for Museums–Sharon Leon, Sheila Brennan, Dave Lester, Andrea Odiorne

This article from the Center for History and New Media continues to explore many of the topics we have been discussing throughout the class, and also connects to the other articles in this post. This is one of the older resources within this set of articles, which in some ways allows us to see how far the development of mobile technology within museums has come in the last thirteen years. The paper addresses some of the roadblocks that museums face when attempting to implement mobile technology to their exhibits, as well as provides some suggestions for the best ways to begin this implementation. One particularly noteworthy section of this paper focuses on how to track visitor engagement through social media platforms and digital spaces where visitors can comment on their experiences. They give the examples of The Mattress Factory and the National Air and Space Museum–both used mobile “to engage visitors in social networking” in order to provide quicker information to the visitors while also gaining information about the visitor experience. While perhaps outdated now, the article touches on problems that began with the introduction of digital technologies to the museums that will surely continue for years to come.

Questions for Mobile for Museums

How should museums address the issues of visitors being so attached to mobile phones that they do not engage with the exhibit, while also implementing programs and resources via mobile phones? How can museums keep visitors engaged on their phones when distractions like social media may be pulling visitors away from the museum content?

What cannot be made mobile? What are some limitations of mobile technology that museums might not be able to get around?

That’s the long and short of it. Looking forward to hearing all of your feedback and to some exciting discussions on Wednesday!

March 2, 2019

HiPSTAS Tagged Audio Before It Was Cool

Now that you’ve learned all about the theories behind conducting, using, and preserving oral history interviews from Alex‘s post on sound studies, let’s dig into some other innovative things digital historians have been doing in terms of making audio files more accessible.

High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship, or HiPSTAS, is a project created by the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin to “develop a virtual research environment in which users can better access and analyze spoken word collections.”

This initiative began out of a 2010 report by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Library of Congress (LoC) that identifies the risk of audio deterioration as a result of unprocessed and inaccessible audio acquisitions in archives. The report echoes the concerns about the life of audio files after the oral history project has been completed, as laid out by Doug Boyd and Michael Frisch.

Titled “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age,” the report identifies the paradox of unprocessed audio files: if researchers don’t use them, archives are less inclined to spend time and money processing them. But if the files remain unprocessed, researchers won’t be able to access them. While most of these issues stem from insufficient indexing of audio files from the time of donation, the report also places blame on the lack of developed software for analyzing and generating metadata.

Since 2013, HiPSTAS has sponsored three conferences (called the HiPSTAS Institute) to discuss issues facing archivists, librarians, and technology scholars when dealing with digital sound files. Hosted both physically and online, these workshops aimed to create a network of scholars, build up published studies in the field, and develop new software tools and techniques to help label unknown recordings.

The HiPSTAS creators set two goals:

To “produce new scholarship using audio collections with advanced technologies such as classification, clustering, and visualizations”
To contribute “to recommendations for the implementation of a suite of tools for collecting institutions interested in supporting advanced digital scholarship in sound.”

So, how do they plan on doing this? I’ll tell you how: Beta-testing, collaboration, and hosting several meetings of the minds (i.e. academics, graduate students, archivists, and other digital humanists).

Outcomes

The major component of the HiPSTAS Institutes was to develop a program known as ARLO (Adaptive Recognition with Layered Optimization). ARLO is an open source machine learning application that was originally created to study and classify bird calls by extracting audio features and displaying the data as a spectral graphs.

HiPSTAS pushes ARLO’s disciplinary bounds from science to the humanities by sponsoring a project where 20 participants experimented with the application to analyze spoken word recordings. The intent was to develop a program that would be applicable to humanities scholars by supporting longer files, implementing play-stop-fast-forward keys, and allowing multiple users to create and share tags. The participants used ARLO to record time and frequency information into a spectrogram, like so:

This graph is brought to you by the HiPSTAS Final White Paper, courtesy of Gertrude Stein saying “some such thing” from a reading of her novel, *The Making of Americans.*

In what is described as “instance-based learning,” participants trained ARLO with 27,000 sample clips from PennSound and 150 hours of folklore from the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. ARLO then matches the patterns in sound clips based on pitch, rhythm and timbre. Colors are assigned to a numerical value of energy—white is the highest energy whereas black is the lowest.

Results of unsupervised learning and clustering of the Radio Venceremos Collection from the Guatemala Police Archives by ARLO, as explained by Abhinav Malhotra.

Through collaboration with WGBH Educational Foundation and the Pop Up Archive (a speech-to-text tool), HiPSTAS has made strides in facilitating the use of ARLO to identify raw footage in collections such as the American Philosophical Society of Native American Projects and the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. The HiPSTAS website currently hosts a series of blog posts with Audio Labeling Toolkits and highlighting projects using ARLO to tag previously unidentified files.

The Ongoing Process

Currently, HiPSTAS is funded by National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access and Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) with the long-term goal to inspire digital innovations that will one day instantly convert speech to text. While this goal is still out of reach, the implications of this technology would make archives searchable and accessible for researchers, with a particular benefit to people with hearing or reading disabilities.

So, in what ways have you seen people and repositories responding to the issue of unlabelled audio files and deterioration? What kinds of problems do you think will accompany unsupervised computer batch classification?

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Perhaps I Need to Rethink My Day Job Transcribing Oral History….

In the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Analysis and Scholarship) grant proposal, the authors express the hope that participants in their program “will understand better how to ‘imagine what they don’t know.’” The readings for this week make clear that the practice of oral history could be and probably should be so much more than it has been heretofore envisioned and practiced, where, at least in my conception of the subject, a historian interviews a bunch of people about a particular topic, has their tapes transcribed, produces a book or a documentary using some of the material in the recordings, and then files the tapes away in a box (possibly in an archive and maybe even with some cataloging) that is likely never to see the light of day again.

In terms of “doing” oral history, the two most conventional readings in this regard are Doug Boyd’s “Designing an Oral History Project” and Kara Van Malssen’s “Digital Video Preservation and Oral History.” Boyd points out that there’s a lot for the historian to think about beyond just the questions that will be asked of a subject when designing an oral history project, and both authors urge the practitioner to think holistically about the project ahead of time, to include not only pre-production and the point of capture, but also considering the entire lifecycle of the project, including editing, archival storage, and future access. “Early choices you make in a project will affect later opportunities,” notes Boyd. “Decisions have consequences.”

While Van Malssen’s discussion of video formats looks forward towards the future and considers issues of preservation of recordings, Jonathan Sterne instead looks backwards at the history of the currently ubiquitous MP3 audio format to examine how decisions going back at least 100 years have had implications for the specifications of this particular format, which reference, sometimes for no better reason than this is how it’s done now so let’s stick with it, specifications from other earlier formats. Stern argues that “encoded in every MP3 are whole worlds of possible and impossible sound and whole histories of sonic practices.” (2)

Particularly important in Sterne’s work is the notion of “format theory,” which I think boils down to the choice of format is not benign because “Format denotes a whole range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience, and workings of a medium. It also names a set of rules according to which a technology can operate.” (7) The assumptions and specifications engendered in each format affect the user’s/listener’s experience of and relationship with the media, and thus in Sterne’s view, it is important to understand how the format mediates the material.

In “Oral History and the Digital Revolution,” Michael Frisch offers an example that I think illustrates the idea of format theory and provides a basis for redefining what we even think oral history is. Frisch’s work illustrates that the audio and videocassette format of oral history recordings have had a profound effect on accessing these resources and understanding the content of these tapes as well. An assumption of oral history practice is that linear analog tapes are a pain to work with and therefore transcoding if you will the content of the recordings from audio or video to text by means of transcription is the best and fastest way for a researcher to access and engage with the content of a recording, to the point that transcription is viewed as an essential procedure. Frisch argues, however, that a great deal of meaning is lost in the translation of sound into text. “Meaning inheres in context and setting, in gesture, in tone, in body language, in expression, in pauses, in performed skills and movements. To the extent we are restricted to text and transcription, we will never locate such moments and meaning, much less have the chance to study, reflect on, learn from, and share them.” (2)

Digital formats, however, offer new possibilities for oral historians. Using timecodes, annotation, and other metadata linked to content, it is easy to quickly dive into digitized materials directly at any point of particular interest in the recording. Thus the recording itself rather than the inherently different experience of a transcript of it becomes the object of study and in Frisch’s words “put[s] the oral back in oral history.” By studying the recording directly, the researcher can engage in what Nancy Davenport, cited in the HiPSTAS proposal, refers to as “deep listening” or “listening for content, in note, performance, mood, texture, and technology.” This additional information beyond the content of the recording in its strict, text-based sense may allow the researcher to gain new insight into the meaning of what has been recorded.

Ethnographer Wendy Hsu seeks to move away from the digital text as object of study paradigm however and “shift the focus of the digital from a subject to a method of research” by combining various quantitative, data-oriented computational analysis techniques with traditional qualitative ethnographic methods including direct observation and interviews to identify, document, and consider the meaning of patterns and processes related to her subject matter, which is musicians of the Asian diaspora. The data-generated patterns uncovered by the quantitative means inform questions that can be further explored qualitatively. Some of the methods she has employed in her work include mapping the geographic locations of bands’ fans by scraping location information from the bands’ MySpace friends’ pages, analyzing non-song sounds in song recordings to learn about the context of the creation of the recording, and using spectrograms to visually analyze stylistic qualities of music.

So how might historians apply similar “doing digital” techniques to their own work with audio and video artifacts? That is very much an open question and one that I’m not sure the readings answered very well. However, one of the stated aims of the HiPSTAS project is to bring together archivists/librarians, scholars, and computer scientists in an effort to create new tools to facilitate the study of sound recordings by means such as clustering, classification, and visualization. Archives are already storing quite a bit of oral history recordings that go unlistened to or unwatched, a valuable resource that Frisch notes goes “largely untapped.” And the HiPSTAS team makes a pretty good point that if researchers don’t start using existing audio collections, then repositories won’t have much incentive to keep storing the old recordings, let alone augment their collections with new materials, so it really is imperative for history scholars to find means to unlock the potential of these audio resources.

There was really a lot going on in these readings and I feel like I barely scratched the surface here of the many issues that the various authors raised. Returning to where I began this though, the readings did really challenge my perception of what exactly oral history is. It isn’t just about interviews or even necessarily the spoken word. A wide variety of preserved audio such as musical performances, ambient sound, speeches, poetry readings, and the telling of stories that have been passed through generations by way of oral tradition can reveal valuable information about the past (or present-day) life and culture. All sorts of sound-based documents could serve as potential primary source material given useful means of incorporating the information they provide or could reveal into one’s historical analyses. This may well be a bit of a “duh” to everyone else, but I guess that’s something that I just had never really considered before. Now I’m trying to imagine what else I don’t know.

What other issues did this week’s readings raise for you regarding the possibilities and potentials brought about by digital means and methods as applied to oral or audio history?