The Project
Dartmouth College, in collaboration with the University of Kentucky, is pursing a multi-year project to enhance the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) with powerful capabilities in the areas of data annotation and visualization. Drawing on methods developed by the DDHI, the project will result in a new version of OHMS that offers accessible and interactive avenues for scholarly research and teaching using oral history archives.
This project is generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with a Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant.
Our partners
Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)
Established in 2008 by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, OHMS is a web-based system that delivers best-in-class interactive user experiences for patrons of online oral history archives. The OHMS application enables archivists, librarians, and other curators of oral history collections to create time-coded and/or indexed versions of oral history interviews. In September 2023, the OHMS application migrated to the Aviary Platform, where it remains free to use. The OHMS viewer provides a user interface for students, teachers, and other researchers to discover and explore oral histories online.
AVP and Aviary
AVP is an information management and software development firm that has partnered with OHMS since 2016. AVP, in collaboration with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, created the Aviary Platform to facilitate publishing, search, and navigation of audiovisual content. With the migration of OHMS to the Aviary Platform in 2023, AVP continues to maintain and host the OHMS technical infrastructure. AVP is also partnering with Dartmouth College and the University of Kentucky to incorporate data encoding and visualization methods from the DDHI into the new version of OHMS.
The vision for our project: Building DDHI capabilities into an enhanced OHMS
The new OHMS application will automatically generate preliminary metadata when an oral history transcript is uploaded. Using Named Entity Recognition, the application will identify entities like people, places, and organizations throughout the transcript. With a sophisticated and user-friendly transcript editor, archivists or librarians will be able to play interview audio/video while simultaneously editing text, adding notes, and/or placing time segment markers for indexing. They will also be able to edit the named entities and review automatically-generated links to contextual information in Wikidata.
The updated OHMS viewer will provide researchers with multiple options for exploring and discovering data within interviews. Users will be able to simultaneously view a transcript, a media player, and customizable data visualizations like maps, timelines, and sortable groupings of the named entities in the interview.
This project will benefit OHMS implementers – the librarians, archivists, and other curators of oral history collections who want to use OHMS to describe and make accessible the contents of oral history archives. The new OHMS application will streamline metadata generation for oral history collections, whether it is used in pre-processing to facilitate the creation of accession records, in post-processing to prepare interviews for exhibit, or anywhere in between.
The project also has clear advantages for end users – researchers, teachers, students, and others – who want to explore and learn from oral history collections. The metadata and encoding generated by the OHMS application will enable robust search and discovery tools for users, including the ability to explore interviews through data visualizations.
Through documentation, user support, and outreach, we will share the results of this project with OHMS’ large existing user base, reach new audiences, and support an inclusive community of practice for anyone who is interested in oral history archives and oral history research.
Project Advisors
- Camron Amin, University of Michigan-Dearborn
- Katherine Bynum, Arizona State University
- Kelly Crager, Sam Johnson Vietnam Center and Archive
- Sharon Leon, Digital Scholar
- Christian Lopez, University of Georgia
- Teague Schneiter
- Janneken Smucker, West Chester University
- Christa Whitney, National Yiddish Book Center
- Bryan Winston, Princeton University Library