Harvesting the Past: How to make interviews with Swedish emigrants to America accessible?
Registration available via the Swedish language page
This event will be in Swedish.
The Swedish Emigrant Institute Foundation collects, preserves, and makes available archival material and literature about the Swedish emigration era from all parts of the country. The foundation was founded in 1965 and today holds the largest collections in the Nordic countries on Swedish emigration. The Swedish Emigrant Institute is located in the House of Emigrants in Växjö and has been part of the umbrella organization Kulturparken Småland since 2014. Kulturparken Småland, in collaboration with Linnaeus University, now invites you to a hackathon on the theme of transatlantic voices.
One of the largest and most challenging collections in the House of Emigrants consists of cassette tapes with interviews with Swedish Americans. Approximately 3,000 first-generation Swedish immigrants were interviewed by the Swedish Emigrant Institute's archivist Lennart Setterdahl during his travels in the USA from the 1960s to the 1990s. So far, 900 of the interviews have been digitized, which corresponds to roughly as many hours of audio. The process is expected to continue in the coming years. The recording quality is uneven, clocks chime, dogs bark, and the interviewees switch freely and fluently between old-fashioned Swedish and English. Through digitization, the Swedish Emigrant Institute fulfills one of the roles of an archival institution: to care for and preserve. The next task is to make the material accessible - which is significantly more complex:
How do you capture the information in thousands of hours of audio, and how can you make it structured and searchable?
The significant advancements made in automated transcription and methods for handling large text collections in recent years bring some hope for the future. However, the many choices ahead can lead to a sense of paralysis. We want to invite everyone interested to this hackathon to test their ideas on the interview material and, during an intensive period, try different solutions. The goal is to generate various ways to get an engaging overview of the collection.
After the event, participants should have had the opportunity to in groups:
- Test one or more methods to transcribe a short selection of the material (optional for the interested)
- Test one or more methods to make the collection's transcriptions manageable
- Produce one or more representations of the material
- Summarize their results in an A3 poster
The event will be held in the large atrium of the House of Emigrants, with access to the exhibition on the theme for inspiration during the work. Participation is free of charge, and registered participants are offered coffee and lunch. After the event, the posters produced will be displayed as part of an exhibition about the collection, aiming to find a way forward to make the material available online. In addition to inspiring continued engagement with an interesting material, we hope that our hackathon offers an opportunity to network with others active in digital humanities, language analysis, corpus linguistics, or historical collections.
This event is a collaboration between Kulturparken Småland, the knowledge environment Digital Transformations at Linnaeus University, and HUMINFRA - a national infrastructure for digital and experimental research in the humanities.
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