A Meeting Minute

Meeting Report: June 2, 2020

by Amy Thiessen (Project Manager)

This week the SpokenWeb team at UBCO has been primarily focused on three endeavours. 

On May 28th, 2020, Dr. Tanya E. Clement (University of Texas at Austin) and her research team offered a workshop on AudiAnnotate. The AudiAnnotate software uses IIIF specifications to open the possibilities of annotating digital audio files for the purpose of metadata creation and the exploration of new research questions. The workshop was professionally and effectively facilitated and the proposed workflow for using AudiAnnotate was straightforward and intriguing. Our local team will be spending some time brainstorming potential uses for AudiAnnotate within our SoundBox Collection. 

With the continuation of remote research, one of the major things our team has been focussing on is transcription. SpokenWeb R.A Megan Butchart (B.A English and History) has transcribed around 70,000 words (approx. 13 hours of audio) over the past 3 months. With more transcribed tapes our team can move forward with more in-depth metadata entry and begin to cook-up some ideas for future research ventures. Read more about Megan’s transcription work in this blog post

Our team is working on developing a series of self-paced, DH training modules that will be presented through Canvas and will offer participants a digital badge upon completion. We will be using the badgr platform to create and issue the digital badges and as we work to develop our credentials as a badge issuer our badges will be able to offer recipients a micro-credential with significant value after successful completion of the training module. The first badged module to be released this summer will be Audio Digitization Level .