{"id":7884,"date":"2018-10-15T07:07:56","date_gmt":"2018-10-15T05:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/oral-history-under-scrutiny-in-munchen\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T15:45:46","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T14:45:46","slug":"oral-history-under-scrutiny-in-munchen","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/c2dh-en\/articles\/oral-history-under-scrutiny-in-munchen\/","title":{"rendered":"Oral History under scrutiny in M\u00fcnchen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In Munich, from 19 to 21 September 2018, a group of speech technologists, social scientists, linguists, computer scientists, oral historians and information scientists convened to explore the integration of digital tools in the workflow of scholars who work with interviews.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heading to M\u00fcnchen at the end September offers the spectacle of cheerful Germans wearing dirndls and lederhosen, celebrating their Oktoberfest with remarkable patriotism and tons of good beer. This year, the Bavarian stronghold hosted another cheerful gathering of a dedicated community: a CLARIN multidisciplinary workshop in which scholars in the fields of speech technology, social sciences, human computer interaction, oral history and linguistics engaged with each others\u2019 methods and digital tools. The idea is that as the use of language and speech is a common practice in all these scholarly fields, the use of a digital tool that is already mainstream in a parallel discipline, could open up new perspectives and approaches for searching, finding, selecting, processing and interpreting data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the fourth workshop supported by CLARIN ERIC<\/a>, a European Research Infrastructure Consortium for Language Resources and Technology, offering a digital infrastructure that gives access to text and speech corpora and language technology tools for humanity scholars. One of CLARIN\u2019s objectives is to reach out to social science and humanities scholars in order to assess how the CLARIN assets can be taken up by other disciplines than (computational) linguistics and language technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the first two workshops in Oxford<\/a> (2016) and Utrecht<\/a> (2016), we assessed what the potential could be of bringing together state of the art speech technology, descriptive and analytical tools for linguistic analysis and oral history data, to open up massive amounts of interview data and analyse them in new, often unexpected ways. Also the website oralhistory.eu<\/a> was set up to cross-disciplinary communicate work from this group. In Arezzo in 2017, the first challenge was taken up, applying speech recognition software to Italian, German, Dutch and English oral history data and evaluating the experiences of scholars. The reasons why CLARIN can make a difference in the world of oral history is explained in a series of short multilingual videoclips with speech technologist Henk van de Heuvel, linguist Silvia Calamai, and data curator Louise Corti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arezzo yielded a roadmap for the development of a Transcription Chain<\/a> (T-Chain), in which various open source tools are combined to support transcription and alignment of audio and text in various languages.  In M\u00fcnchen we had the opportunity for \u2018the proof of the pudding\u2019, testing the prototype of the T-Chain, known as the OH-Portal, with data that had been pre-selected and prepared by the workshop organisers and sessions leaders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\nPoster of the Munich conference <\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Cross disciplinary overtures between linguists, historians and social scientists.<\/p>\n\n\n