Rec'd with a tech glitch.  --gw

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 2012 20:16:59 -0400
From: sburns <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: UT iSchool Professor Tanya Clement Awarded NEH Grant

AUSTIN, Texas ? A professor in the School of Information at The
University of Texas at Austin was awarded a $235,000 grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to develop data mining tools
with the potential of making hundreds of thousands of audio files more
accessible to scholars and researchers.

The research is, in part, a response to an August 2010 report by the
Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources
titled, ?The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States:
A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age? that says our culture will
not preserve what it does not know how to use.

According to Tanya Clement, assistant professor in the School of
Information, libraries and museums across the United States have
tremendous collections of audio files however they are, for the most
part, inaccessible.

?Computer scientists have created tools that group music according to
such things as pitch, tone and tempo in order to categorize them as
jazz, pop or classical. Similar systems have been developed to do the
same kind of analysis on spoken text files, one factor that makes
poetry, folklore, or presidential speech recordings unsearchable and
therefore, inaccessible.?

The funds will be used to support a four-day institute in Spring 2013 at
The University of Texas at Austin geared to humanities scholars,
librarians, curators, collectors, computer scientists and archivists.

The four-day workshop, called the Institute for High Performance Sound
Technologies for Analysis and Scholarships (HiPSTAS), will focus on
developing tools to help analyze speech, using criteria such as
patterns, pitch, spectral range and speed of speech. The attendees will
focus specifically on poetry, speeches and folktales.

One year later, a follow-up workshop will focus on implementation of the
analytical tools and advanced technology (classification, clustering and
visualization) to develop a suite of digital tools for use by interested
institutions.

?There are hundreds of thousands of important spoken text audio files,
dating back to the nineteenth century and up to the present day that
represent significant literary figures and bygone oral traditions that
are virtually inaccessible in this digital age,? said Clement. ?We have
very little access to these cultural artifacts.?

--
Sam Burns
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