Oral History under scrutiny in München; a multidisciplinary workshop with interview data

In this München workshop, we devoted 2 days to our participants’ experimenting with four tools for semantic annotation and linguistic interpretation tools, building on the homework we had asked them to do, i.e.to install and become familiar with 5 tools. These ranged from annotation of digital sources (ELAN and NVivo) to linguistic identification and information extraction tools. These were applied to text and audio-visual sources, with the intent of detecting language and speech features by looking at concordances and correlations, processing syntactic tree structures, searching for named entities, emotion recognition, etc. Sessions were conducted in four language groups (Dutch, English, German and Italian) and comprised 5-6 people (linguists, oral historians, social scientists and digital humanities scholars); a formal group evaluation followed each session. Their feedback suggested an overall positive experience. However, some of the approaches, for example, language features identified through concordances, such as use of particular and co-occurrent words and multi-word expressions in an interview, were very new to some of the scholars. Due to unfamiliar terminology and the unknown/unusual methodology of linguistic research, some people initially really struggled to comprehend how they worked and what their purpose was. However, we also witnessed some pleasing ‘Eureka’ moments where scholars appreciated how (much) such analytic tools might help complement their own approaches to working with OH data, enabling them to elucidate features of spoken language, in addition to content. (VOYANT, Stanford NLPCore, TXM and Praat). Some participants struggled to download so ware which suggested a lack of basic technical proficiency. This could turn out to be a significant barrier to the use of open source tools that often require a bit more familiarity with, say, laptop operating systems. It was useful to have human language technologists sitting amongst the scholars, witnessing first-hand some of the really basic challenges in getting started.