Testimony Transcription at the Archive
A note from Christy Bailey-Tomecek, AV Access Services Librarian, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive: Since 2017, the Fortunoff Archive has been steadily transcribing our collection of over 4,500 testimonies. Transcription is inherently an imperfect representation of a video testimony: it leaves out visual cues, what Laurel Vlock called “demeanor evidence,” as well as inflections of speech, tone, and emotion. The archive feels strongly that researchers should refer to the original document, the video testimony, not the transcripts as the definitive source, but it is impossible to deny that transcripts allow a layer of searchability that goes beyond keywords and controlled vocabularies. Moreover, with over a dozen different languages, being able to search in the native language is an enormous benefit to researchers with the necessary language skills. It is also important that we make testimonies accessible to viewers that are deaf or hard of hearing, or have auditory processing disorders. The process of transcription at Fortunoff Archive is a complex, multi-step effort. Much of the initial work is done using speech-to-text AI applications, also known as audio speech recognition (ASR). These applications have provided us with accessible transcripts, but not perfect ones. ASR applications can struggle with video testimonies […]
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