#popuparchive

[volevofaresololaphotoeditor]

--> L'ICP di New York presenta Pop-Up Archive

Cartoline, santini, album di famigli, foto online. Oggi più che mai la produzione infinita di immagini provoca inquietudine più che certezze. Le foto sono manipolate, de-contestualizzate o ri-contestualizzate, l’autore diventa quasi irrilevante come la fonte mentre le immagini si appropriano di una nuova vita. 

(Foto:  Paula Lombardi)

Quando --> 17 maggio all’ICP di New York

[dailyjewishstudies]

Voices of the Jewish Diaspora

Jewish culture has evolved tremendously in modern history, leaving behind a rich legacy with rich audio artifacts to match. Thanks to the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, Pop Up Archive now has access to important Jewish oral histories and speeches.

[dailyjewishstudies]

Via PopUp Archive: Voices from the Jewish diaspora

The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art & Life

Voices from the Jewish diaspora

Established at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library in 2010, the

Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

holds a number of rare and newly digitized recordings. Thanks to the Magnes Collection, we now have access to important Jewish oral histories and speeches.

Among these recordings is a

historic 1956 speech from Golda Meir

, then Foreign Minister of the State of Israel, who became Israel’s fourth Prime Minister in 1969.

Meir speaks to the Israel Bonds Development Corporation of America about the history of Jewish persecution and the contentious founding of Israel.

Meir says: "No sooner did we declare our independence then we were in the midst of a very bitter struggle for our very existence.”

She describes a matter of life or death: "...[The] Jewish people have been faced with another problem: And that is to live or not to live. There were many moments in our history when it would have been very convenient for others had we decided not to live. ...For us to have remained alive meant also to keep alive the desire and the dream and the determination to be free and independent."

Other recordings include "

A Dinner of Appreciation to the U.N.

" from 1965, a 1968 speech from Israel’s fifth prime minister,

Yitzhak Rabin

, and an oral history of

Seymour Fromer

, who co-founded the Magnes Museum with his wife Rebecca Fromer.

Take a listen to more of the newly digitized audio already available on Pop Up Archive:

Listen: The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life

See you in the archive,

The Pop Up Archive team

[willtech]

Pop Up Archive: Breakthrough in Speech to Text?

For the past year I've been working with a startup called the Pop Up Archive to improve the way WILL is archiving digital audio. It's one thing to save a number of files in some form of managed digital storage - and in WILL's case it's a very large number of audio files. The challenge is knowing what the files are. Metadata is the yin to a bitstream's yang; without it, we can't really claim to be preserving anything. 

Why should we care about preservation? Because media technologies and formats are changing so fast, the only way to keep things accessible is to manage them over time.

So we have many thousands of digital audio files and we need metadata. We typically create a basic title for each asset, and keep things like creation date, producer names, and usually a short description and some subject terms. But if you were looking for anything more granular, or if you were looking for Google to be able to search for anything significant contained in the audio itself, you would be disappointed.

This is where the Pop Up Archive comes in. They are developing next generation speech-to-text technology that appears to represent a breakthrough in accuracy. Automatic transcription of audio is one of those hard problems. The audio quality can vary from great to terrible. Music or noisy background environments can obscure the words. Accents and specialized vocabularies can complicate things further. 

But check out this transcript for one of WILL's audio archives:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1472/items/10811

Here's one of a recent WILL News story:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1468/items/29493

Here's an interview with the writer Jean Thompson talking about her recent book The Witch and Other Tales Re-told:

https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/1468/items/28294

Are these perfect? Not yet, but the improvement over anything I've seen before is astonishing. Most importantly, they are good enough to make the audio content indexable by Google, and accessible to people with impaired hearing. The full meaning of the audio content is accessible.

Let's just use the word "accessibility" to mean universally usable by all. That's what we're trying to do with public media. If we're going to do that with audio, we need to extract the semantic content from the bitstream and make it accessible. A year ago, we signed up with the Pop Up Archive to try and make that happen. They're moving forward faster than I imagined.