ORAL HISTORY INVESTIGATION

Meeting for Textile Tales

On Monday 6th February I met Tom Fisher, Tonya Outtram and Helen Foster (EMOHA) with Stef De Sabbata, to explore the opportunity to use the Textile Tales recordings and transcriptions in the Oral History Investigation. Tom and Tonya were interested in the experiment and the potential application as a research tool. Tonya knows very well the dataset and she is still working on it for her PhD. We discussed the need to frame an agreement for the use of the data (which is preserved as -permanent public resource in the EMOHA archive with copyright retained by NTU) and her potential contribution. I asked to access the Consent Form developed in the project for the interviews to share with the legal team.

Meetings with Stef De Sabbata

Over the week I had other two meetings with Stef De Sabbata: one with Alex, to update him on our session in Leicester and discuss the next steps, and one with Daniel, to involve him in the discussion around the Mines of Memory collection, which will be the first dataset tested.

Stef has submitted the ethic application to use this EMOHA collection for the first round of pre-processing and they might be able to start the experiment in early March. We decided to schedule the next session on Friday 31st March in Leicester, where we can start discussing the first visualizations. Alex suggested that this session could be part of the series of workshops/meetings that are being planned as part of the Energy strand. I agree with this proposal, as the first round of pre-processing will be done using a mining dataset and it would be important to discuss the results with historians, researchers and curators involved in mining history. We discussed the opportunity to involve Daniel, Graeme, and the energy-related partners in the future sessions to share the results and discuss potential research questions they might have. Their feedback will be key to inform the next steps.

On Monday 13 Stef and I start discussing the Mines of Memory dataset with Daniel, to find potential connections with other datasets he is working on, and we invited Daniel to join our next session on 31st March. We agreed to schedule a further meeting with Colin Hyde (EMOHA) to better understand the history of this dataset and identify potential biases in the data.

Meeting with the Legal Team

On Friday I met Celia Richardson from the Legal Team with Carol and Alex to start discussing the agreement with the University of Leicester, which will include a data sharing element (for the datasets Mines of Memory and Textile Tales) and Stef’s intellectual contribution as data scientist in the investigation.

FOLK SONGS INVESTIGATION

Drop-in Session

On Monday 13 we had a very helpful Drop-in Session with Kunika and Felix where we started to familiarize with some of the tools we could use in the investigation to connect song lyrics to museum collections. Drawing upon Daniel’s transcription of the Come all ye bold miners anthology, we began to reflect on the potential of text analysis tools such as Voyant and AntConc to identify words in the lyrics, seeing them in context and exploring their frequency in the overall dataset. Kunika also showed how to use XML to add annotations to the text and train NER model to identify specific categories in the text that the automatic NER tools are not able to identify. She added an ‘OBJECT’ label to the word ‘lamp’ as an example. We discussed the opportunity to use Prodigy to involve folk songs experts in this type of annotations, but before using a tool like Prodigy, we need to design a schema and decide what labels we need. Daniel suggested to process the mining dataset through Voyant and AntConc to start discussing potential categories. We scheduled a follow-up meeting this week to start discussing these first results.

Meeting with Tim Smith

Very inspiring meeting on Friday 10 with Tim Smith. We had the opportunity to catch up on what we have been doing in the past months. Tim is interested to include a folk songs element in his exhibition proposal for his HomeGround project, that can be potentially be connected to the Bradford City of Culture. I updated him on where we are with the investigation and we discussed the opportunity for the textile dataset to include Asian textile songs, a connection Jennifer Reid was interested in exploring as well. He will send me a book which contains some transcriptions that I can add to the textile dataset.