– Smithsonian transcriptions
– Crowdsourcing: cost efficient
– Question: how do you translate this to oral and video history?
– Video history: a lot of it is restricted, but some examples of video content:
– Manhattan Project
– Small arms history (including history of AK-47)

– Take reel-to-reel material on digital recorders
– Audio cassettes
– Sent to contractor to be transcribed

– Funds: sketchy

Challenges of oral transcriptions:
– Ensuring accuracy: accents, misheard words
– Tedious: pause, rewind, play, pause, rewind, play, repeat…

How do we accommodate for these problems?

– becomes more manageable if you break it up into segments: 30 seconds every 10 minutes
^ improves accuracy
– in a crowdsource context, divide it up by time stamps and assign people minute blocks
– recognizable people and recordings: entices people to participate
– have a notes portion: people can make notes of time stamps and confusion about language understanding
– But if there are unknown figures, contextualize them: e.g. why was this person important to xyz movement? How did this person influence xyz public figure?
– time stamps: makes it really clear where a project stopped
– tools to slow down speech

Potential tools:
– iTunes, Express Scribe, YouTube, iMovie (Mac; can alter pitch, speed, tone)

Data visualization:
– If you get demographics of digital volunteers, you can map where they are and what content they tend to be interested in
^ future donors and fundraisers can come from this

Why do you transcribe oral histories?
– Accessibility
– data mining: make it accessible to new research techniques
– social network analysis: transcribe and make conclusions about relationships
– preservation: if it’s recorded on a cassette or something that might be hard to digitize, you have the words forever
^ also an argument for keeping cassettes and similar media; notion that this is valuable oral content

Is there a way to build an online tool where once an oral history exists online, it can automatically enter a data mining program?
– there should be a way once an oral history is approved, you can send it directly through a code which submits it in a data context
– could be multistep, but you could build a single online forum for it

Failure is success: you rule out dead ends and apply it to your next effort

Group Bibliographies
– annotated bibliographies
– shared bibliographies (e.g., through Zotero)

Transcriptions
– permanency
– skill-neutral

– “Make gov transparent and accountable through data, tools, policy and journalism”
– free, open-source; staff of designers social scientists, reporters, policy, developers, comms
– sunlightfoundation.com/api/community: projects to assist with!

What not to do:
– Data can be pretty, but does it SHOW anything
– No key, no introductory texts, no clear message of the data
– “Number art” pretty, but doesn’t tell you information
– No scales, labels, titles

“Data pervs”
– Notion that something is pretty, so it must “mean” something
– But this can mean that just because something is aesthetically appealing, people might not look deeply into it/question it
– “WTF Visualizations: Visualizations that make no sense” Tumblr page

“Squint test”
– Graphics that tell the story on the first glance
e.g. informative headlines, notable images like red lines indicating increase/decrease
– Use context: what are themes that people commonly understand? E.g. take numerical data and put it in the context of how it would fill a football field
^ most people have an estimate of the size of a football field; makes abstract data more accessible

Disseminating data
– Reporters can take screenshots of data graphics
– Reporting for reporters; making it more bite-sized for reporters to quickly understand information
– Social media shares

TOOLS:

Maps
– Show geospatial trends e.g. where are political fundraisers happening?
– www.mapbox.com

The R Project
– Data visualization coding tool online
– R-project.org

Tableau
– Basic coding

Developers/Coders:
– github.com/sunlightlabs

Sunlight Foundation Data Visualization Style Guide

Be open to and flexible with whatever tools are available! If it gets the job done, use it

My idea for a session (the title needs work) is to have a group discussion about the sources we use for research on a regular basis. To keep things focused, each participant will introduce a source he or she uses regularly and then describe some of its advantages and disadvantages. The rest of us would then add our own thoughts. After a set time passes (based on how many people are participating and the length of the session), the next person would step up to share another source. We’ll go in a circle like this until the last fifteen minutes, when we’d jot down a few general conclusions and save them along with our notes in session entry in the THATCampDC site.

As an example, I’ve been using The Perseus Project for years to study Ancient Greek texts. For my turn, I’d introduce the site and talk about how I use it for translations and downloading texts. Then, I’d discuss what I think is positive and negative about it for my research and bring up issues that I think relate to everyone in the group. Several people sharing similar reflections about their favorite sources would, I believe, spark a great discussion.

I’d also like to encourage participation by campers who work for institutions that publish source material for the public. That would bring into the conversation the perspective of those behind the sources that we’ll be disscussing. Of course by the end of the session, I’d love to see both sets of campers, both those who are researchers and those who work with sources, connect with each other.

-Laszlo

This short discussion is based on an idea of an educational platform that allows people to study ( watch videos and read articles, books, take tests etc) based on social media hashtags.

By grouping people based on selected interests they can “enroll” and follow a social media syllabus that integrates their top three interests ( academia, art, science, sports etc) I have been experimenting with the concept so far on social media applications such as instagram and I would love to share the idea to get some feedback.

– Kwasi

We might elaborate on these scenarios to explore questions, including:
How might we balance research goals with interesting research and exchange knowledge in a collaborative space? How can we open spaces for more but unexpected collaboration and what tools might help facilitate the process? What parts of the experience make the sum greater than the whole – and more importantly, what can sharing those parts of your success do to help wider communities of practice?
Let’s explore these questions–and more we discover along the way–together in this session.