Audio-Video Barn Website

The Audio-Video Barn Website:
Using Digital Technology to Share
Oral Histories with Communities

by Robert Warren 

(Forthcoming,  Oral History Review Volume 40 Issue 1 Summer:Fall 2013, Oxford University Press)

Abstract

The Oral History of Illinois Agriculture project has created a rich, interactive website—the Audio-Video Barn—that gives voice to people involved in agriculture and rural life in Illinois. The Barn contains more than 130 interviews totaling more than 300 hours of audio and video recordings. The methods we employed can serve as a model for anyone looking for engaging new ways to share oral histories with community audiences. First, the Barn contains whole interviews, not just the excerpts or clips commonly made available in books, articles, performances, or documentaries. This allows visitors to experience and interpret testimony in the context of longer narratives. Second, the Barn joins a growing chorus of websites that go beyond the limitations of printed words in traditional oral-history transcripts. The site engages visitors with primary-source audio and video recordings that restore emotion and meaning to the stories being told. Third, the Barn gives back to its subject community: the hundreds of thousands of farmers and other participants in Illinois’ agricultural industry whose stories are now being told online in a variety of accessible ways. Beyond this, the multiple pathways to stories incorporated in the Barn’s design will appeal to wider audiences. Teachers, K-12 students, and historical researchers will find tools that equip them to explore audio and video narratives in a variety of ways: (1) by browsing galleries, maps, and lists for names, places, and collection institutions of interest, (2) by entering keywords to search for topics discussed in and among the Barn’s 3,500 interview clips and segments, and (3) by creating faceted searches to find subsets of clips and segments that share user-specified times, themes, or locations. The flexibility inherent in our design will also be of interest to oral historians who wish to share audio and video narratives with their diverse audiences.

Why: The Audio Video Barn goes beyond the repository to use a contextualizing exhibit to bolster meaning and attract an audience. It illustrates new directions in oral history dissemination.

Introduction

Paul Thompson has observed that “oral history is a history built around people. It thrusts life into history itself and widens its scope. … It brings history into, and out of, the community.”[1] Few oral historians would disagree with Thompson’s sentiments. Oral history tells the stories of everyday people, not just the rich and famous. The stories invigorate history and broaden its reach. And there is no question that oral history brings history out of the community. But what kind of progress is being made in the other direction, the path bringing history into communities? Are oral historians giving back as much as they receive? In a recent appraisal of volunteer community-history projects, Thompson and Corti appeal for more and better sharing of results.[2] Were he writing today, Thompson might well conclude that returns to community fall short in conventional approaches to oral history.

Oral histories are made available to public and professional audiences in a variety of formats, including books, articles, documentaries, museum exhibits, performances, and websites.[3] In their richness and diversity, these productions are testaments to the historical value of oral narratives. However, there are several problems here. First, producers commonly use short selections of testimony extracted from the framework of longer narratives. The extracts may illuminate chosen themes or events, but they often provide little more than snapshots of the narrators’ life stories. Second, the medium of oral-history presentation is usually text-based. As Michael Frisch has pointed out, the “Deep Dark Secret” of oral history is that few people ever hear or see the core audio and video recordings that comprise the field’s primary sources.[4] Transcripts have traditionally served as the medium of choice for research and presentation, despite the fact that meaning is lost when voices are reduced to words on paper.[5] A third problem is a matter of audience definition. Many of the books and articles produced by oral historians are written for academic audiences, not for the general public or members of subject communities. Documentaries, performances, and exhibits are important avenues for sharing oral histories with wider audiences. But more can be accomplished with new digital tools that make it possible to transform large collections of primary-source audio and video recordings into searchable online databases that can be browsed and explored — not just by historians, but also by subject communities, students, and the general public.[6]

Drawing from the emerging field of “digital history,”[7] this paper presents a case study that demonstrates how oral historians can use digital technology to bring communities into intimate contact with their stories. The focal point is the Oral History of Illinois Agriculture (OHIA) project. The main goal of this project was to create an interactive website called the Audio-Video Barn that is filled with searchable oral-history interviews with people involved in agriculture and rural life in Illinois (U.S.A.).[8]

Materials and Methods

Illinois Agriculture. Illinois is located in the midwestern United States between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. It is a glaciated region with fertile prairie soils, and has been a major producer of agricultural products ever since the French Colonial era of the eighteenth century. Today it it ranks highly among American states in the production of corn, soybeans, pumpkins, horseradish, and hogs. Illinois is also home to two giants in the production of agricultural equipment, John Deere and Caterpillar. Although Illinois has a rich history of agricultural innovation and change, the story is rarely told in major museum exhibits or accessible media.

The OHIA Project. The OHIA project used oral-history interviews to tell the story ofIllinois agriculture from the perspective of the people who know it best: grain farmers, beekeepers, elk ranchers, 4-H kids, college professors, pumpkin growers, and others from every corner of the state. The project began in 2007 with the support of a two-year National Leadership Grant to the Illinois State Museum (ISM) from the federal Institute ofMuseum and Library Services. I served as principal investigator; Dr. Mark DePue from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM) served as co-principal investigator. ISM’s major partners on the project include the ALPLM, Northern Illinois University (NIU), the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS), and Randforce Associates LLC (University at Buffalo Technology Incubator, SUNY). Consultants from six major universities, the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and the Illinois Farm Bureau provided valuable advice on oral-history procedures and agricultural issues.

Project Goals. The main goal of the project was to develop a website called the Audio-Video Barn, featuring digital oral-history interviews with a wide range of people involved in agriculture and rural life in Illinois. Some interview recordings came from old audio tapes housed in library and museum archives. Others are from new audio or video interviews recorded specifically for the project. Interviewees include older people with memories of long agricultural careers, middle-aged people actively engaged in agriculture, and young people looking forward to agricultural careers. Another major goal was is to index the interview recordings by subject matter so users of the website can search them interactively for subjects of special interest. The project’s five organizational themes include land, plants, animals, people, and technology.

Old Interviews. Old audio interviews with significant agricultural content were selected from oral-history archive collections at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS). The recordings were digitized from analog cassette tapes and converted to Waveform (.wav) files.[9] The NIU interviews were recorded in 1986 by student interviewers in a class taught by Dr. Valerie Yow. Interviewees were from DeKalb County and other nearby counties in northern Illinois. This collection includes 18 interviews with 19 people (19 hours). The UIS interviews were culled from a large oral-history collection founded by Dr. Cullom Davis. These were recorded from 1972 to 1993 with individuals living primarily in central and southern Illinois. The UIS collection includes 42 single-person interviews (165 hours). One additional interview, the oldest in the collection, was recently donated to ISM by a granddaughter of the interviewee, George Howe (1870-1953). This 32-minute interview was recorded in 1952 on Mr. Howe’s 82nd birthday, and in it he recalls childhood memories of farming in the 1880s. Together, the 61 old audio interviews total 185 hours of interview material.

New Interviews. The initial plan for new interviews, as set out in our grant proposal, was to record 50 interviews divided equally among interview crews from ISM and ALPLM. Interviewees were selected from a list of more than 160 candidates. In our selection process we sought gender balance, ethnic diversity, young people as well as adults, wide geographical dispersion, and experience in many different aspects of agriculture. One difficulty we had during the interview process was our reluctance to stop at 50 interviews. We continuously met interesting new people who filled gaps in our content coverage, and we finally drew the line after conducting 78 new interviews with 84 individuals.

Digital video cameras were used to record most of the new interviews so that sights as well as sounds could be displayed on the website. The ISM crew used a Sony HVR-V1U high-definition video camera equipped with a wireless lavaliere microphone and hard-drive data storage. We recorded backup audio with a Marantz PMD620 flash recorder and Audio-Technica lavaliere microphones. The ALPLM crew worked with a team of videographers from Illinois Information Services that used a standard-definition video camera and recorded audio with a Marantz PMD671 flash recorder and Shure lavaliere microphones.

Many of the interviews are traditional “sit-down” interviews in which interviewees talk about their life histories and agricultural experiences. Others are what we call “walk-and-talk” interviews in which interviewees demonstrate agricultural activities in the field, in the orchard, or in the dairy barn. For example, in one walk-and-talk interview an Amish farmer provides a narrative on horse training as the video clip shows a team of six Belgian draft horses pulling a harvesting machine across a field of alfalfa. In another, a professor of animal sciences at the University of Illinois demonstrates a novel computerized feeding mechanism that allows researchers to monitor the food intake and weight gain of individual beef cattle.

The ISM crew completed 47 interviews with 51 individuals. Among these are 39 sit-down interviews (56 hours) and 33 walk-and-talk interviews (17 hours). Interviewees range in age from 12 to 96, and include grain farmers, a beekeeper, an elk rancher, 4-H kids, and growers of pumpkins, peaches, oregano, and organic chickens. The ALPLM crew completed 31 interviews with 33 individuals, including 30 sit-down interviews (39 hours) and 11 walk-and-talk interviews (7 hours). The ALPLM interviewees include broadcasters, veterinarians, corn and soybean researchers, fish farmers, migrant orchard workers, an animal-science professor, and a former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

Digital Processing. Digitized audio files and born-digital audio, video, and image files were downloaded to external hard drives and labeled following a standard protocol. Files were described using metadata that conforms to Dublin Core standards.[10] All were transferred for permanent storage to two LaCie RAID arrays. High-definition video files (AVCHD format) were rendered as standard-definition AVI files, and working copies were burned onto DVDs. Digital audio and image files were stored as Waveform (.wav) and TIFF (.tif) files, respectively. Descriptive information includes interview abstracts and captions for audio, video, and image files.

Digital Indexing. The 139 interviews housed in the Audio-Video Barn correspond to more than 300 hours of interview recordings. Hundreds of topics are discussed by a diverse sample of people whose first-hand agricultural experiences extend from the 1880s to 2009. One of the biggest challenges of our project was to develop a mechanism that would allow Web visitors to quickly and easily find material of interest to them in this large body of interviews. In partnership with Dr. Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert of Randforce Associates LLC, we used a procedure called “digital indexing” to make the audio and video recordings searchable.[11]

The indexing procedure was initiated using InterClipper software, a program originally designed for recording and analysis in the market-research industry.[12] InterClipper is a linear, single-track multimedia editor combined with a relational database. InterClipper Pro works with audio files; InterClipper Video works with video files. We stripped the audio from our video files and used InterClipper Pro to process all of our interviews. One limitation we encountered with InterClipper is its three-field structure for categorizing and indexing in the default database. In the intitial testing of our data, we decided that this default structure was not flexible enough for our goals. To get around the problem we assembled the index terms and notes (see below) in a rigidly structured format within the InterClipper “Notes” window. This formatting allowed us to later parse the data with hypertext preprocesser (PHP) scripting language to pull out content for website development.[13]

The first step in digital indexing was to subdivide each interview recording into a comprehensive series of 5-15 minute “segments.” The average duration of segments in sit-down interviews is 11.5 minutes, which corresponds to about five segments per interview hour. Each segment is generally comprised of one or more “passages,” a series of questions and responses often associated with a handfull of related topics. Passages were not formally demarcated within segments using time stamps, but they are ordered chronologically to facilitate the preparation of notes and indexing terms (see below). In addition to the segments, we also defined brief “story clips” within interview recordings to attract visitors to the collection. Story clips are special highlights, generally 1-3 minutes long, that will be of special interest to many viewers. To arouse curosity and encourage exploration of the collection, we gave clips engaging titles, such as “Sowing Like in Bible Times”, “Cussin’ Helped Mules Pull”, and “Farmers are Chemically Dependent.” The Audio-Video Barn presently contains about 1,500 segments and 2,000 story clips.

The second step in the indexing process was to summarize and index each of the interview segments and story clips by subject-matter content, much as one would abstract, catalog, and index a book. We used four types of indexing metadata, all of which are searchable, including (1) Control words,  (2) Sub-control words, (3) Text Notes, and (4) Names, Places, and Dates. Control words and sub-control words are controlled-vocabulary terms developed specifically for the agricultural and rural content of our interviews. Our list of control words includes 27 general cataloging terms (e.g., CROPS, EDUCATION, FAMILY, LAND, LIVESTOCK, RELIGION, WORK). Sub-control words (n = 155) are somewhat more specific terms and are hierarchically linked with control words. For example, CROPS is associated with five sub-control words (Cash Crops, Feed Crops, Specialty Crops, Orchards & Fruits, Vineyard) and LIVESTOCK is associated with 11 sub-control words (Beekeeping, Beef, Dairy, Hogs, Horses, Mules, Poultry, Sheep, Livestock Products, Livestock Care/Health, Livestock Feed). In practice, control words and sub-control words were sometimes used interchangeably depending on the content of the narrative. Text notes are brief written summaries of the narrative associated with each passage, segment, and clip. Finally, the “names, places and dates” section lists family names, towns, counties, and dates (by decade) in each segment.

To help clarify our application of indexing metadata, consider an example from an audio interview in the UIS collection. This 22.5-hour interview was recorded in 1975 with Bert Aikman, a 97-year-old man who had farmed in central Illinois most of his life. The second Aikman interview file, 38 minutes in length, was subdivided into four segments. Segment 1 is 12.5 minutes long and it, in turn, was subdivided into six passages. In this example there are six control words, one for each passage: FOOD & MEALS; PESTS; ORCHARDS; FOOD STORAGE; FERTILIZER; FOOD & MEALS. The list of names, places, and dates in the segment includes “Litchfield, Illinois” and the decade “1910-1920.” The first passage has one control word (FOOD & MEALS), two sub-control words (Crops; Corn), and the following notes: “Describes preparation of corn to make hominy. Never saw yellow corn until he moved up to Montgomery County in 1910. Before that all he knew was white corn. A neighbor still grows white corn, but local elevator will not buy it. He sells it to mills down south where they make it into grits. White corn is used as human food & not as much as stock food. Describes cracked hominy that was sold in grocery stores. Ate a lot of cornbread, but ‘Dad was a biscuit man!’ Traded wheat for flour at a mill in Litchfield; did this every fall to have flour for winter.” The second passage has one control word (PESTS), one sub-control word (Weevil), and the following notes: “No weevils in flour. Pests were not as bad as they are today.” The four remaining passages discuss apple orchards; storage of fruit and meat in the smokehouse and underground; fertilizing the garden with horse manure; and purchasing some groceries at a store in town. All terms present in the indexing metadata are computer searchable, including control words, sub-control words, names/dates/places, and all text in notes.

Development of the control-word vocabulary was an iterative process; it started with a short list of topics that grew, shrank, and was revised and edited over time. The challenge of successful control words is that they must be broad enough to encompass all content, but specific enough to facilitate search and exploration. At the same time, the total number of terms should be small enough to be manageable and easy to implement during the indexing process. Our list of control and sub-control words consists of 180 terms.

Editing. Digital indexing is a subjective process and several individuals participated, so it was necessary to edit the indexing metadata to ensure consistent use of search terms within and among interviews. One person was responsible for editing. Because InterClipper lacks editing tools, we migrated the data to a Microsoft Access database to take advantage of its search-and-replace and spell-check operations. Additional editing occurred during the process of website development (see below).

Transcription. All new sit-down interviews were transcribed by theTapeTranscriptionCenter, a division of The Skill Bureau inBoston,Massachusetts. ISM and ALPLM teams of interns and volunteers audit-edited the draft transcripts, returned them to interviewees for review and comment, and made final edits for publication on the project website (.pdf files). Transcripts of old audio interviews from the UIS collection had been scan-digitized and published online prior to our project. The NIU interviews have not yet been transcribed.

Website Development. The challenge of website development was to create flexible and user-friendly tools for navigating, filtering, and searching our 3,500 multimedia interview files (segments and story clips), while maintaining as much of the context and voice of the interviews as possible. Because our project was among the first to place a large, searchable oral-history database on the web, there were few precedents and it was necessary to innovate.

We developed the Audio-Video Barn using a MySQL database for storing settings and searchable content, and the Drupal content-management system to create the website itself.[14] MySQL is an open-source relational database-management system that makes InterClipper and Access data searchable in a Web environment.[15] It allows navigation through the database, full text searching of notes, and filtering based on control-word vocabularies. Drupal is an open-source web-development tool written in PHP scripting language.[16] It allows individuals or organizations to publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of website content without requiring technical knowledge of hyper-text markup language (HTML). We selected Drupal because of its functionality, including the ability to create new content types in the Content Construction Kit module and its flexible method of data display in the Views module. A variety of design themes are available; we are using a modified version of the Simply Modern theme created by Tribute Media.[17] Interview recordings on the website are accessed with Flowplayer, an open-source, flash-based audio and video player.[18]

Results

The Illinois State Museum launched the Audio-Video Barn website at a press conference in November, 2009.[19] The website houses more than 130 audio and video recordings of oral-history interviews with people involved in agriculture and rural life in Illinois. More than 300 hours of recordings are available, all of which are searchable in a variety of formats so visitors can easily find material of interest.

Home Page. The home page welcomes visitors to the website and introduces the OHIA project. Navigation tabs are arranged across the top of the page beneath a graphic banner (Welcome; Browse & Search; Picture Gallery; Education; About this Site; Contact). Beneath the project logo and introductory text is a list of bullet-point navigation hints that encourage visitors to “Hear,” “See,” “Locate,” “Find,” “Look,” “Learn,” “Teach,” and “Peek” their way around the site. A panel called “Stories from the Barn” gives visitors a quick and easy way to sample some of the site’s audio and video recordings. It displays links to five brief story clips randomly selected from the collection of more than 2,000 clips stored in the Barn.

Browse & Search Tab. The Browse & Search tab takes visitors to the website’s navigation center. A “People” browser displays a photo gallery of all interviewees ordered alphabetically. A guided search panel on the screen allows users to select subsets of the list by Interview Decade, Age at Interview, Gender, County, or Last Name. Users can also filter the interviewees with faceted searches, which involves narrowing the field (“drilling down”) by selecting two or more categories of any number of variables. For example, a faceted search of “females” interviewed at age “90-100” narrows the field from 139 individuals to just four: Margaret Honey, Emma Snodgrass, Geneva Sweet, and Marie Williams. The People browser also contains a clickable map of interview locations, a list of interviewees, and an interview search page that operates on keywords or categorical variables. An “Oral History Collections” browser groups interviews by institution of origin (NIU, UIS, ALPLM, ISM) and by type of interview (sit-down vs. walk-and-talk).

Selecting an individual opens their home page, which contains biographical data, interview data, photos, a transcript link, and links to all of the interview’s segments and story clips. Complete interview can be viewed by clicking on the first segment and progressing to the last. Also visible on screen are control words and notes associated with each segment.

A Clip Search page enables powerful, fine-grained searches of interview clips and segments within and among all interviews. Search terms can be typed into a keyword-search box or selected from a long list of guided-search terms. The guided-search terms are organized by project theme (land, plants, animals, people, technology) and include control words, subcontrol words, and words appearing in segment or story-clip notes. Other search terms include dates, places, and interview medium (audio or video). Faceted searches can be launched with any combination of variables. For example, selecting the “1890s” narrows the field from 3,470 clips to 68 clips; selecting “oats” narrows the field to one clip, a discussion of crop yields in one segment of the George Howe interview.

Picture Gallery Tab. The Picture Gallery contains hundreds of historical and recent photographs grouped by theme. The photos show land use, landscapes, environment, crops, livestock, draft animals, individuals and families working and playing on farms, farm buildings, and a variety of farm machines, tools, and implements.

Education Tab. The Education section provides instructions on how to conduct oral-history interviews. It provides tips on audio and video recording, and also contains instructional videos created by students enrolled in the ISM Museum Tech Academy. Hands-on family and school activities include lesson plans in the fine arts, language arts, natural sciences, and social sciences, all of which conform to national and state learning standards.

Conclusions

The Audio-Video Barn is a rich, interactive website that gives voice to people involved in agriculture and rural life in Illinois. The methods we used to develop the website can serve as a model for anyone looking for ways to share oral histories with large audiences without falling into the traps outlined in the introduction to this paper. First, the Barn contains whole interviews, not just the excerpts or clips commonly made available in books, articles, performances, or documentaries. This allows visitors to experience and interpret testimony in the context of longer narratives. Second, the Barn joins a growing chorus of websites that go beyond the limitations of printed words in traditional oral-history transcripts. The site engages visitors with primary-source audio and video recordings that restore emotion and meaning to the stories being told. Third, the Barn gives back to its subject community: the hundreds of thousands of farmers and other participants in Illinois’ agricultural industry whose stories are now being told online in a variety of accessible ways. Beyond this, the multiple pathways to stories incorporated in the Barn’s design will appeal to wider audiences. Teachers, K-12 students, and historical researchers will find tools that equip them to explore audio and video narratives in a variety of ways: (1) by browsing galleries, maps, and lists for names, places, and collection institutions of interest, (2) by entering keywords to search for topics discussed in and among the Barn’s 3,500 interview clips and segments, and (3) by creating faceted searches to find clips and segments that share user-specified times, themes, or locations.

In his 2007 discussion of the digital revolution in oral history, Alistair Thomsen asked: “At what point will extensive collections of indexed audio and video oral history recordings be readily accessible and searchable via the Internet?”[20] Given that the interactive Audio-Video Barn website is among the first to meet these criteria, the answer to Thomsen’s question is “now.”

Acknowledgments

The Oral History of Illinois Agriculture project was supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. I served as Principal Investigator for the project. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Illinois State Museum for their many contributions: Dr. Erich Schroeder, Michael Maniscalco, James Oliver, Sue Huitt, Pat Burg, Doug Carr, and Beth Shea. Major project partners include Dr. Mark DePue (Co-Principal Investigator) of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Cindy Ditzler of Northern Illinois University, Thomas Wood of the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Dr. Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert of Randforce Associates LLC, University at Buffalo Technology Incubator (SUNY). Dr. Tom Clark of TA Consulting served as Project Evaluator. Last, but certainly not least, we thank our outstanding interviewees for sharing their stories with us and with the world.

Adapted from Proceedings of the 16th International Oral History Conference, July 7-11, 2010, Prague, Czech Republic

Citation for Article

APA

Warren, R. (2012). The audio-video barn website: using digital technology to share oral histories with communities. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Institute of Library and Museum Services. Retrieved from https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/audio-video-barn-website/.

Chicago

Warren, Robert. “The Audio-Video Barn Website: Using Digital Technology to Share Oral Histories with Communities,” in Oral History in the Digital Age, edited by Doug Boyd, Steve Cohen, Brad Rakerd, and Dean Rehberger. Washington, D.C.: Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2012, https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/audio-video-barn-website/

This is a production of the Oral History in the Digital Age Project (https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).  Please consult https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/about/rights/ for information on rights, licensing, and citation.