May 9, 2002-Vol33n28: Software aids oral historians

Software aids oral historians

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

A UB historian has developed a unique application for a software originally developed for the industrial market-research field that has enormous implications for thousands of audio and video history collections held in archives around the world.

Michael Frisch, professor of history and senior research scholar, has found a way to make these collections useful tools for education and research by rendering them, for the first time, searchable and accessible.

The application maintains the integrity of the original, firsthand oral documentation and obviates the need to use voice-to-page transcription or voice-recognition software.

"This is revolutionary," says Frisch. "This process collapses what has been the great distance between archival service and scholarship and posterity, and makes collections immediately available for educational and popular use."

Frisch says it will be an enormous boon to oral historians, archivists and documentarians who work in audio, video, film or multimedia formats. They will be able to deal with the content in its authentic, spontaneous, richly affective form.

The process employs Documat LLC's relatively new Interclipper software to record archived oral material directly into a computer and permits the material to be indexed, searched and retrieved.

It is a principal tool of Frisch's company, The Randforce Associates, which consults and assists users in the new field of digital oral-collection management.

Randforce has just moved into the UB Technology Incubator.

Frisch points out that oral and video history tapes are important because they offer deeply textured, historically important, first-person accounts and eyewitness reports of important events and personages. The conventional way of handling oral documents has been to turn the voice or image into text in the form of collection catalogues, logs, indexes and, most often, transcripts.

"These are produced at great cost," he says. "The results are voluminous and expensively produced written texts that are only marginally easier to search and seldom indexed for ideas or concepts.

"The end result," he adds, "is at a considerable remove from the original format in which authority was carried in the voice and image—the reason the tapes were produced in the first place."

Interclipper software originally was developed for the industrial market-research field. It works well for oral-collection management, he says, because it permits the key passages in oral and video history texts to be tagged, coded and copied into an interactive database that can be searched, indexed, catalogued and recopied.

Once transformed into interactive oral databases, they can incorporate photos, video clips and other materials that can be browsed and linked to further resources.

"To apply this market-research software effectively to the very different needs of an oral-history collection is complicated, however, and has a steep learning curve," Frisch says. That's where Randforce comes in.

He says the company will facilitate use of this technology by helping curators and archivists develop subject-specific codes and index categories for individual collections and assist them in the construction of the taxonomy. Once in place, the program will work in much the same way as a good written index works to offer direct access to the contents of a collection.

In this case, however, the end product will have the additional advantages of digital immediacy, richly enhanced levels of cross-referencing and searching, and immediate output of selected passages.

Randforce is a small company that offers a range of services from simple consultaton to training and full project development, depending on client need.

It already is at work on two contracted projects through which it is exploring the application of its core technology to specific oral-history collections.