How IVT Technology is Changing Cultural History
New Video Transcription Used by Archivists and Historians
Archival programs in North America are few and far between. Only a handful of programs available, the majority of archive programs are narrowly focused on records management techniques. Unfortunately, for social and cultural historians, this narrow approach has its limitations.
Marginalization of Oral History
Because of this, archives remain, largely, material repositories of cultural memory. However, this presents a problems for cultural historians, because culture is often resistant to material preservation. Consequently, there is always a tension between scholarly efforts to reconstruct history and interpret cultural traditions and the fragmentary, and often limited, material record.
While scholarship is shaped by negotiation around the historical silences that encompass all of material culture, historical silences are often marginalized, or even excluded, by a sensitive configuration of material evidence with oral history.
The New Archival Sciences
As a result, a new generation archivist are being motivated by the long term preservation of moving images and by the invention of new paradigms for access to celluloid, tape, bits and bytes. It is argued that this new method of archival science should be rooted in historical, practical and theoretical study. Rather than limiting itself to one methodology, it needs to assign equal importance to heritage collections and emerging media types.
Interactive Video/Transcript Viewer (IVT)
One example of innovative ways of recording the past is UBC's First Nations Studies Program's oral history archival projects. In particular, Interactive Video/Transcript Viewer (IVT) is a web-based tool that sychronizes a video with its transcript, so as users play the video, its transcript updates automatically.
In addition to searching a video's transcript for key words and phrases, and then playing the video from that point, IVT includes a tool that allows users to create a playlist of clips from interviews for use in meetings. While it took historians thousands of hours of transcription work, IVT transcribes in real-time. These are the types of technologies archivists need to be aware of, in order for us to create active archives. And this is where information professionals need to be aware - to anticipate the needs of its users.
The IVT is designed with the following features and capabilities in mind:
- It allows users to view video and transcripts simultaneously
- It allows users to move through a video/transcript easily
- It allows users to move easily between sessions
- It allows you to provide chapter markers for user navigation in sessions
Historians and IVT
For historians and researchers, the search capabilities of IVT are invaluable. Because IVT has a built-in search function, users may select the search function from a button on the lower menu bar of the standard interface.
A pop-up search screen appears. If a session has already been selected, the search screen shows a scrollable transcript of the current session. If no session has been selected, the transcript is of the whole series, and this "series view" may be selected at any time by a button provided.
Searching and Finding on IVT
The standard "find" feature of the user's browser may be used to search the full session or series transcript by word or phrase. When a section of interest is located, the user may load it and return immediately to the viewer by clicking on the index mark preceding each page in the search transcript. Users may return to this search function at any time by clicking on the search button again.
Conclusion
It is one thing to have hours of video in an archive made available to users, on disk or on line, and quite another to provide ways for users to find sections of video that they would like to see and get to them quickly. Because IVT is designed for the users in mind, the opportunities for librarians, historians, and archivists are unlimited.
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