Here is a quick summary of the meeting.

In attendance was: William Ashworth, Daniel Belteki, Carol Chung, Wayne Cocroft, Paul Craddock, Ros Cranston, Graeme Gooday, Helen Graham, Jamie Unwin, Nina Webb-Bourne, Kylea Little, Bernard Musesengwe, Lauren Padgett, Simon Popple, Tim Smith, Jane Winters, Stefania Zardini Lacedelli (let me know if anyone is missing).

• We started from a brief update on the development of the October workshop in Manchester (20/21 October). Helen gave an overview of the responses to the call for participation and of the preliminary conversations that Helen, Arran and Stefania are having with potential participants:
  • Matthew Watson, Curator of art and social history at Bolton Museum
  • Mike Nevell (Industrial Heritage Network)
  • Sarah-Joy Ford, Textile Artist and Post-Graduate Researche
  • Sarah Irving, Lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history at Staffordshire University
  • Other conversations have been scheduled for the next week with Jennifer Reid and Gherdai Hassel, and further suggestions can still be made in the shared spreadsheet.
• Alex suggested to start sharing potential dates for the last textile workshop in December.
• Paul shared some reflections on his first video experiments exploring the connections between industrial culture, music and oral history recordings. New video material been recorded at Bradford Industrial Museum involving the museum staff, but the video quality would not be enough for exhibition purposes. Will suggested to include Quarry Bank in this work.
• We discussed the opportunity to connect these experiments with the first Congruence Engine exhibition which has started to be discussed with the SMG exhibition team (next meeting scheduled on 24 October). Alex and Simon suggested other exhibition ideas around reconstruction of 3D environments and the use of computer vision (see links below).
• Stefania gave a brief update on the speech to text comparison study she is undertaking with Nina and Jamie’s help. Four tools have been explored until now (Sonix, Otter, Trint, HappyScribe) and they all have a price plan. Despite some differences in accuracy, these tools are pretty good in recognizing words (including names of places, people, machines and techniques), but they would require a level of manual editing for word checking and differentiating the interviewer from the interviewee.
• Tim Smith suggested to speak to Rob Perks, former Curator of Oral History at the British Library. Anna Maria shared the BBC inhouse speech to text tool Kaldi offering her help in this study.
• Will suggested to do a similar study for the transcription of handwritten documents, to extend the temporal horizon of sources (Transkribus was mention in this context). We discussed about the need to use different methods for different types of sources and Jane highlighted the importance of combining different approaches

Please feel free to add anything missing. Jamboard link is here.

The links shared in the chat include:

• A blog post written by the archivist Jan Shearsmith at the Science and Industry Museum on a collection of textile samples 200 years old shared by Stefania as a potential member of the SIM to invite in the workshop
• Paul’s first video experiment shared by Paul
• Victorian Elsecar reconstruction video, shared by Wayne
• Experience Temple Works project, shared by Simon as an example of an immersive experience but also collaboratively constructed archive of information
• BBC inhouse speech to text tool Kaldi, shared by Anna Maria