Exploring the archives for textual entry points to speech - Experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration in making cultural heritage accessible for research

Tilltal (Tillgängligt kulturarv för forskning i tal, 'Accessible cultural heritage for speech research') is a multidisciplinary and methodological project undertaken by the Institute of Language and Folklore, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and The Swedish National Archives in cooperation with the National Language Bank and SWE-CLARIN [1]. It aims to provide researchers better access to archival audio recordings using methods from language technology. The project comprises three case studies and one activity and usage study. In the case studies, actual research agendas from three different fields (ethnology, sociolinguistics and interaction analysis) serve as a basis for identifying procedures that may be simplified with the aid of digital tools. In the activity and usage study, we are applying an activity-theoretical approach with the aim of involving researchers and investigating how they use - and would like to be able to use - the archival resources at ISOF. Involving researchers in participatory design ensures that digital solutions are suggested and evaluated in relation to the requirements expressed by researchers engaged in specific research tasks [2]. In this paper we focus on one of the case studies, which investigates the process by which personal experience narratives are transformed into cultural heritage [3], and account for our results in exploring how different types of text material from the archives can be used to find relevant sections of the audio recordings. Finally, we discuss what lessons can be learned, and what conclusions can be drawn, from our experiences of interdisciplinary collaboration in the project.
QC 20210322