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Published: 12 June 2018

Last Updated: 12 June 2018

AUDIO ARCHIVES AT THE CROSSROADS OF SPEECH SCIENCES, DIGITAL HUMANITIES AND DIGITAL HERITAGE

February 14-16, 2019

Department of Education, human sciences and intercultural communication, Arezzo

Audio archives are common in different disciplines within the social sciences and humanities and Information and Communications Technology, from the various fields of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, dialectology, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, etc) and speech technologies (natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, etc), to oral history, ethnography, sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

They contain vast amounts of information relevant to social sciences and humanities but at the same time they are underutilized material of intangible cultural heritage. Crucially, the fragmentation of archives, repositories, and data centres undermines the accessibility and reuse of oral archives.

The congress aims at discussing possibilities for a closer collaboration between speech scientists, conversation analysists, speech technologists and oral historians.

Potential questions include:

• What are the challenges involved in the re-use of speech and oral archives collected for other purposes?
• What kind of opportunities do oral archives provide for speech technology?
• What do linguistic uses of historical narratives look like? What are the opportunities and challenges of using oral history archives in linguistic research? What are the opportunities and challenges of phonetic tools for oral history and social sciences? In what ways could oral historians profit from a closer collaboration?
• What are the challenges involved in the long-term preservation and in the metadata description of digital archives? What are the challenges and the risks associated to legal and ethical issues?
• What are the opportunities and the threats associated to online audio archives sharing? What are the long-established standards and the welcomed ones? What are the online share-platforms and the forthcoming projects? What are the opportunities at EU level for the preservation and maintenance of audio archives?