Hello, fellow HIPSTAS.

In general, I’m hoping to learn as much as possible from everyone present at the Institute. Having a collection of researchers, scholars, and archivists in conversation with each other about new approaches to digital sounds collections seems to me to be an incredibly valuable model of exchange and collaboration.

That being said, my specific reason for attending HIPSTAS is, in part, to learn more about how scholars and archivists might use and develop new tools to think about sound collections. I believe that large oral history collections have tremendous potential as research resources for scholars in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, sociology, history, geography, and others. Developing a more efficient and effective infrastructure to unlock not only the themes and subject of each interview, but to also allow researchers to perform complex linguistic analysis, discover songs, recitations or fragments of poetry in the collection, gauge the tone and timbre of the recorded human voice, or learn more about the incidence of different languages occurring in interviews between bilingual participants (to name a few examples), will be invaluable.

I’m looking forward to the continued discussions.