October 29, 2010 Presented at Oral History Association Meeting, Atlanta, GA

1. Facilitating Access to Video Oral Histories through Informedia Technologies and a Multimedia Web Portal Mike Christel christel@cs.cmu.edu Entertainment Technology CenterCarnegie Mellon University October 29, 2010 Presented at Oral History Association Meeting, Atlanta, GA

2. Talk Outline (Heavy on demonstrations, light on slides….) • Introduction to oral history concerns/opportunities • Quick overview of CMU Informedia research • The HistoryMakers African American oral history archive • Field tests with The HistoryMakers • Lessons Learned • Flash Web Site • Next Steps Reference: http://www.idvl.org For more info or to express interest: Email info@idvl.org

3. Why Oral Histories? • Oral history has been embraced as a useful tool for: • “…giving voice to those who have been excluded from the historical record” • “…adding richness and personal perspective to the historical record and engaging students and scholars in a lively study of history” • Contextual inquiry has found that oral history recordings are considered a central historical artifact • Significant hurdles in oral history access are brought upon by the linear nature of speech and the extended length of some interviews: Jong, F. D., Oard, D. W., et al. 2008. Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage 1, 1 (Jun. 2008), 1-27

4. CMU Informedia Digital Video Research • 1994-2007 details at: http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu • New work for oral histories at http://www.idvl.org • Speech recognition and alignment • Image processing • Named entity tagging • Synchronized metadata for search and navigation • Fast, direct video access to oral histories, news, etc. • Demonstrated successes (NIST TRECVID) with broadcast news, documentaries, surveillance video in nursing homes, oral histories – over 45 TB • Oral history work has included work with Harrisburg, PA 150 and The HistoryMakers (over 1000 hours and 20,000 stories) – funded via NSF IIS-0705491

5. The HistoryMakers Oral History Archive • http://www.thehistorymakers.com • Funded in part by IMLS Grant LG-03-03-0048-03 • The world’s largest African American oral history archive with accomplished African Americans • Purpose: • To educate and show the breadth and depth of this important American history as told by the first person • To highlight the accomplishments of individual African Americans across a variety of disciplines • To preserve this material for generations to come • Committed to exposing the archive to the widest audience possible, making use of new technologies as appropriate

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9. Statistics from Field Tests, 2008-2009 • Field-tested at Drexel University, The HistoryMakers office, 3 campuses of the University of Illinois • 266 participants (158 female, 108 male) used system • 210 people used it for only one logged session, 34 participants used it twice, 18 people used it three to five times, with 4 people using it six or more times • 381 sessions were logged, representing 329 hours of use, based on recorded session start and end times.

10. Participant Demographics

11. Transaction Log Results

12. Lessons Learned • Improved delivery infrastructure (web client vs. stand-alone lab-only access) • Clean, simple access • Intuitive “standard” use of text search • Intuitive filtering A web portal (in Flash) was developed for The HistoryMakers, and then tested by 27 participants (13 female, average age 25) in which users were asked to do two tasks, one a direct lookup “treasure hunt” and the other open-ended and exploratory.

13. Web Portal Empirical Study Results

14. Empirical Study, Post-Task Survey Data

15. Value of Video Varies by Task • The value of representation modality can be masked by the task: • If only direct lookup (treasure hunt) is studied, the video modality may be seen as unnecessary over searchable transcript text. • By considering exploratory tasks, the value of video for life oral histories is acknowledged. • Interestingly, even for open-ended exploratory tasks, an aligned text transcript modality remains highly valued for oral histories. More details at: 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).

16. Web Site Demo Adobe Flex used to build Flash interface to oral histories providing: Text search (using Lemur open source indexing) Map search (using Yahoo! Maps) Tag search Video play with synchronized transcripts Filtering (based on provenance data such as narrator gender and birth year) Try it yourself at www.idvl.org

17. Future Work • Faceted search (e.g., showing at a glance the distribution of stories across categories, allowing for quick interactive filtering and review) • Simple to use menu bar (as is popular on e-commerce sites) • Emphasis on aesthetics (improved interface coming soon!) • Further iterations based on web metrics • Streamlining on the processing side (currently a text xml file and a video file are the input)