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Collaboration between The HistoryMakers and Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Project
The HistoryMakers Digital Archive of 310 African American video oral history interviews is available online for the first time on a test basis to registered users. This archive includes 14060 stories from nearly 700 hours of video given by 310 HistoryMakers, recorded primarily from 1999 to 2005.
Founded in July of 1999, The HistoryMakers has grown into the nation's largest African American video oral history archive. Its collection includes the interviews of President Barack Obama (then an Illinois State Senator), and civil rights leader Julian Bond, to name a few.
The interface is being iteratively developed and refined, beginning with a strong foundation of work from the NSF-funded digital video library work that has taken place at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) under the Informedia research team. The active collaboration of The HistoryMakers and its executive director Julieanna Richardson with CMU makes this work possible. The first collaboration between The HistoryMakers and Informedia was made possible through the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Grant LG-03-03-0048-03. The online web Digital Archive benefited greatly from a workshop held at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) in the summer of 2007 under the direction of Randforce Associates, in the UB Technology Incubator. This workshop started off a multi-year beta test of a stand-alone .NET oral history interface with the University of Illinois, Drexel University, Carnegie Mellon University, and others. Randforce Associates, led by Michael Frisch, in 2009 contributed to the development of the inferential indexing framework supporting the "Search Tags" capability in The HistoryMakers Digital Archive.
The goal of current NSF funding, NSF Grant No. IIS-0705491, is to share Informedia processing capabilities and interfaces especially suitable for video oral history collections as open source, for the benefit of other video collection holders and users. The work was presented at the annual Oral History Association (OHA) meeting in 2008, and will be presented again at the OHA Meeting in October, 2010.
On the CMU path to this goal of openly sharing systems, software, and interfaces into digital video libraries, we are beta-testing features with The HistoryMakers as well as other oral history collections. For a roadmap of our foundation work, please consult the following references (and check the video demos below).
References
- Christel, M., Stevens, S., Maher, B., and Richardson, J. Enhanced Exploration of Oral History Archives through Processed Video and Synchronized Text Transcripts. Proc. ACM Multimedia Conference (Florence, Italy, October 2010).
- Christel, M.G. Automated Metadata in Multimedia Information Systems: Creation, Refinement, Use in Surrogates, and Evaluation(book link). San Rafael, CA: Morgan and Claypool Publishers, 2009. DOI:10.2200/S00167ED1V01Y200812ICR002
- (Conference Demonstration) Christel, M., Baron, R., Froh, G., Benson, D., and Richardson, J. Accessing the Densho and HistoryMakers Oral History Collections via Informedia Technologies. Proc. ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Austin, TX, June 2009), p. 465. DOI: 10.1145/1555400.1555516
- Christel, M. Supporting Video Library Exploratory Search: When Storyboards are not Enough. Proc. International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) (Niagara Falls, Canada, July 2008), pp.447-456. DOI: 10.1145/1386352.1386410 (0.3 MB PowerPoint slide set shown at conference)
- Christel, M., and Frisch, M. Evaluating the Contributions of Video Representation for a Life Oral History Collection. Proc. ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh, PA, June 2008), pp. 241-250. DOI: 10.1145/1378889.1378929 (1.7MB PowerPoint slide set shown at conference)
- Christel, M., Richardson, J., and Wactlar, H. Facilitating Access to Large Digital Oral History Archives through Informedia Technologies. Proc. ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Chapel Hill, NC, June 2006), pp. 194-195.
Short Video Demos of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in a .NET Windows Application
This interface was field-tested at a number of universities, including the University of Illinois (Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign campuses), Carnegie Mellon University, Drexel University, and the University of Pittsburgh. The field tests led to a number of iterative improvements, while also underscoring the need for an always-online web access point. The following demos (available in two formats) illustrate the .NET interface and illustrate points made in the above-referenced papers.
Please make note of the intellectual property limitations regarding the imagery and video shown in these demonstrations, namely that all content is the property of The HistoryMakers: all proposed uses must be submitted in a proposal in advance to The HistoryMakers for approval before anything can be used and approval is totally at the discretion of the The HistoryMakers.
Narrated Flash Mp4 Demos of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in a .NET Windows Application
Narrated 2.5 Minute Demo of The HistoryMakers Oral Histories with Map, Visual, and Advanced Search
Narrated WMV Demos of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in a .NET Windows Application
Narrated 2.5 Minute Demo of The HistoryMakers Oral Histories with Map, Visual, and Advanced Search
For more information, contact Michael Christel, Principal Investigator, NSF Grant No. IIS-0705491, research project "III-CXT: Enhancing Digital Video Libraries through the Evaluation and Transition of Automated Techniques for Visual Processing, Indexing and Access"