Oral History Metadata Synthesizer

31 Comments / Digital Humanities / By

The Oral History Metadata Synthesizer developed by the University of Kentucky has great potentials in effectively managing oral interviews. In order to use the system, I uploaded an oral interview from YouTube, using the link. This process was very straightforward to do. After uploading the interview, I discovered that my video wouldn’t play. Thankfully, Dr. Sharon Leon was able to figure out what the problem was. The Youtube link to the video began with https. Simply removing the ‘s” resolved the issue. Rather than https, it became http.

Creating the metadata on OHMS was simple. Indexing the interview was challenging. With the video open through the “Index” link, you click on tag and it opens a window that has a player for the video. The player has a pause button as well as a rewind and fast-forward button. It also has a time update button for your transcription. I tried to translate one sentence of the interview at a time and yet it was hard to pause and play. The buttons are too tiny. They could be bigger. It was hard to go from the transcription to the pause and then update the time and return to the transcription. I did not feel that they saved any time. It would have been much easier for me to transcribe the audio directly without doing the time update. However, I recognize the value of the time update.

The biggest challenge with the OHMS system is the lack of clear instructions. I consider myself technologically savvy and yet I had difficulties navigating their website and what we are expected to do with this system. I am not sure I even fully understand the system. I will continue to try the system.

31 thoughts on “Oral History Metadata Synthesizer”

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