Meeting Report: June 9, 2020
by Amy Thiessen (Project Manager)
The SpokenWeb team at UBCO has been focussed on a number of projects this week ranging from graphic design work, to starting work on a new SoundBox Signals podcast episode, to parsing through metadata challenges.
Yasaman Lotfizadeh, SpokenWeb team member and graduate student in the Digital Arts and Humanities IGS program, completed work on a design project. Yasaman has designed the badge images that will accompany our self-paced, Audio Digitization training modules in Badgr (see the last meeting minute post for more details on this project). The badge image is the cornerstone of the success of digital badging as all the badge metadata and accreditation travel virtually alongside the badge image. Yasaman took inspiration from both the AMP Lab and SpokenWeb logo designs to create a brilliant and stand-out badge design.
New to SpokenWeb, Claire Halston (MA candidate) has joined Ahlam Bavi (PhD candidate) and podcast producer Nour Sallam (BA Hons English) as they begin developing a new episode of SoundBox Signals that will centre the Songs of the Lancashire Cotton Famine project, which is led by Dr. Simon Rennie of the University of Exeter. Stay tuned for the release date of this episode.
Our resident metadata expert, undergraduate RA Megan Butchart (BA Hons English), has been thinking through the challenges that come with the unique nature of our collection when it comes to metadata entry. Unlike many other collections across the SpokenWeb network, our collection includes a large number of classroom lectures and informal conversational recordings— both of these categories we perceive to be less common elsewhere. Megan has been in touch with the larger SpokenWeb metadata controllers, librarians Roma Kail (U of Toronto) and Tomasz Neugebauer (Concordia), to discuss these challenges and work on making amendments to the SpokenWeb metadata ingest system, SWALLOW. Here is a screenshot of the newly added “classroom recording”:
