Audiofile project

[Natalie Kononenko]

Dear Colleagues,



Several years ago we developed
http://projects.tapor.ualberta.ca/UkraineAudio/.  This is a website with
most of the sound recordings which I made during my folklore fieldwork in
Ukraine.  It is indexed and the index is linked to the sound so that, when
one clicks on a desired topic, the program goes directly to the point in the
sound file where that topic is discussed.  The website also allows the user
to move the cursor on the audio player and to check the context in which a
particular topic appears.  This is a great research site and I have used it
for my work and other scholars have used it for theirs.



This is a research site.  In contains information that is essentially
unprocessed except for the indexing.  And it contains more information than
anyone other than a scholar would want.  To make our materials more
accessible to the public, we used Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council support to develop
http://research.artsrn.ualberta.ca/ukrfolklore/index.html. On this site we
have sample songs, stories, legends, beliefs.  This site invites the public
to select the text that they like and to transcribe and/or translate it.  The
purpose is to have the public help researchers and each other by providing
transcription and translation services.  It is also to guide the researcher.
By seeing which texts people in the community select to transcribe or
translate, we get to see what kinds of texts interest them most and this
helps us prioritize audiofiles for processing and possibly publication.



Please have a look at this site.  All of the soundfiles can be heard without
signing in and all of the materials that have already been processed are
also visible without a password.  The password is necessary only for those
who want to do the transcription and translation.



Besides asking you to look at the site and give us feedback, we hope to
engage you in our project.  If you want to transcribe and/or translate
Ukrainian folk texts, please, by all means, do so.  More importantly, we are
looking to you to determine the next step in our research.  We are at the
point where we can:

1) Try expanding this to languages other than Ukrainian.  We have a web
template that can be used with any language and we have experience dealing
with one ethnic community that can be applied to other communities.  If you
are interested and have the materials (audio files in the target language),
please contact me at nataliek at ualberta.ca.

2) The other possible direction for expansion would be to materials other
than songs, stories and legends.  Someone out there might want festival
descriptions processed, or perhaps interviews with an artist need to be
transcribed.  Both of  these might be things to groupsource – put out there
for the public to work on through the Wiki format.  The site can handle
video.  I'm sure that coding photos might also be an option.



So, if you have materials that you would like to try making available
through a type of Wiki, do let me know.  Depending on how things go, I would
consider applying for another grant and, if you become a partner, this might
be a source of graduate student or other support.


-- 
Natalie Kononenko
Kule Chair of Ukrainian Ethnography
Editor, Folklorica
University of Alberta
200 Arts Building
Edmonton AB Canada T6G 2E6
780-492-6810
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/uvp/

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