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December 2, 2002 Vol.73, no. 15F
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| NSYNC: EECS Ph.D. student Scott Klemmer
has synchronized video and text to create a multimedia experience
for oral history readers. Photo by Angela Privin. |
Student
designs books that talk and move
EECS Ph.D. student Scott
Klemmer can really make books come to life. With just a zap of a handheld
computer he not only makes texts talk, but also move.
Klemmer’s contribution to the world of oral history is Books with
Voices, which links transcripts to corresponding audio and video from
a historical interview. The result is a multimedia experience that adds
a compelling, personal dimension to reading oral histories.
Oral histories were conceived in 1948 by a Columbia University professor
as a new paradigm in documenting history with community member interviews.
In 1954, the Berkeley Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) was founded
on the fourth floor of Bancroft Library to document California’s
colorful past.
Klemmer worked with ROHO and image communication company Ricoh to develop
a handheld video device that uses bar codes to synchronize a sentence
with corresponding video footage.
During field tests, Klemmer found that people accessed the video an
average of 10 times. “It is typical to access the video in the
beginning to get a sense of the subject’s character,” says
Klemmer.
The video was also invoked to get important information about the subject’s
intonation or facial expression. Books with Voices also lets readers
bookmark video segments that interest them.
The handheld video monitor was constructed from a personal digital assistant,
augmented with a bar code reader and a hard drive.
As ROHO moves from analog to digital transcription for its oral histories,
Klemmer’s technology will be incorporated into the archive.
The technology would have taken a year or two to build if Klemmer hadn’t
collaborated with Ricoh. Jamey Graham and his colleagues at Ricoh had
already completed a year of research on the technological infrastructure.
With this head start, Klemmer completed the project in three months.
While it now takes the high-level knowledge of an EECS grad student
to build this sort of system, Klemmer’s dissertation system, Papier-Mâché,
is a programming tool kit that would allow basic programmers to link
physical and digital interfaces. “Building an interface that links
physical and electronic media is currently difficult and requires a
lot of time and expertise,” says Klemmer.
Klemmer’s work focuses on the needs of the community he serves.
He compares himself to a digital anthropologist. “Instead of going
to the Amazon, I go to Web design firms or the oral history office to
do my research. The tools I build come strongly out of that field research,”
he says.
When conceiving the Books with Voices project, Klemmer addressed the
low-tech prominence of paper in people’s lives. Instead of trying
to replace paper with technology, Klemmer combined it with digital media
to create a stronger tool for the purpose.
“Predictions of a paperless office in the information age didn’t
happen. More paper is generated now than ever before,” says Klemmer’s
faculty advisor, EECS professor James Landay.
This technology could be applied to other paper-heavy domains like the
patients’ files kept by doctors or hospitals, Landay adds.
To find out more about the Books with Voices project go to guir.berkeley.edu/oral-history
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