The Future of Oral History
by David Pescovitz
Scott
Klemmer holds the Books with Voices prototype device.
(Click for larger image.)
David Pescovitz photo
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There is an odd
inconsistency in the way today's oral historians work. For those
who study recorded interviews of personal experiences and recollections,
the essential artifact is, of course, the recording of their subject.
Why then do these audiotapes and video clips gather dust in the
tombs of research libraries while the oral historians toil over
reams of paper transcripts?
It's all in the interfaces, says Scott Klemmer, a computer science
graduate student in the College of Engineering's Group for User
Interface.
"The interface with paper is far better than the interface with
time-based media like videotapes," says Klemmer. It's much more
efficient, he says, to scan through pages of text than fast-forward
through a videotape, or piles of tapes.
It was this realization that inspired Klemmer, with collaborators
Jamey Graham and Gregory Wolff from Ricoh Innovations, to spend
the summer developing Books with Voices. Computer science
professor James Landay, a researcher with the Center for Information
Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), is Klemmer's
faculty advisor.
The
Books with Voices device is outfitted with a portable
hard drive to store the digitized video. Future models might
wirelessly access the video clips from a central server.
(Click for larger image.)
Photo courtesy Scott Klemmer
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Books with
Voices intuitively ties paper transcripts of oral history recordings
with the original videotaped source material. The system is based
on tagging paper transcripts with bar codes, similar to the UPC
codes on products that are scanned at the grocery store check-out.
But rather than product information, the Books with Voices
barcodes are time-stamps that represent the location of a particular
passage in the original video recording. To access the video, the
user simply presses one button on a souped-up handheld computer
to scan the barcode beside a particular passage and in seconds the
appropriate video clip plays on the screen.
"The printed paper becomes the actual interface to the time-based
media," Klemmer says.
To develop a system that oral historians would find valuable, Klemmer
immersed himself in their discipline. First, he and his collaborators
gathered data from the researchers at Berkeley's highly-regarded
Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) at the Bancroft Library. Based
on the ROHO experience, Klemmer became confident that the Books
with Voices approach was compelling because it augments rather
than replaces paper.
A
"one-button interface" enables the Books with Voices device
to scan a barcode and call up the appropriate video clip
with a single click. (Click
for larger image.)
Photo courtesy Scott Klemmer
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"The paper transcripts
produced by our system behave identically to the current transcripts,
because bar-codes aside, it is the same system," Klemmer and his
colleagues write in a paper about the project. "The whole user population
does not have to simultaneously decide to change how they read."
To further understand the context of the problem, Klemmer attended
an oral history training workshop and conducted videotaped interviews
with Berkeley computer science professors David Patterson and Carlo
Séquin about their experiences in graduate school. These
interviews became the basis of a usability study with 13 participants
from ROHO, the University of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Computer
Science Graduate Student Book Club.
The participants
were given editing and summarization tasks. Watching the entire
video would have taken longer than the time allotted to complete
the task, necessitating the need to use a combination of the video
and the paper transcript. The user response, Klemmer says, was overwhelmingly
positive. The participants watched video clips 10 times an hour,
on average.
"People use the video a lot in the beginning to get a sense of the
character," he says. "Then they tend to refer to the video for very
compelling parts that are funny or cute or emotionally charged.
They also look at the video if they think there may be errors in
the transcript."
The video, he explains, is particularly helpful to understand the
subtleties of conversation.
"A sentence said straight is very different than something said
sarcastically, and that doesn't come across just reading the transcript,"
he says.
Books with Voices is background research for Klemmer's dissertation
Papier-Mâché, a toolkit for tangible interaction —
specifically interfaces that integrate the physical and electronic
world. As he begins building the toolkit, Klemmer also plans to
continue working with the oral historians in Bancroft Library. Someday,
he hopes Books with Voices will become part of the daily
practice of Berkeley's oral historians.
"The laboratory study we ran gives us a little bit of insight, but
the really deep questions about how and why oral historians would
use this technology will only be answered by a long-term study,"
Klemmer says.
Scott Klemmer's home
page
Books with Voices
Group for User Interface Research
Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking
research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.
Editor, Director of Public Affairs: Teresa Moore
Writer, Researcher: David Pescovitz
Designer: Robyn Altman
Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu.
© 2002 UC Regents.
Updated 11/1/02.
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