DH Press’s audio/transcript widget offers a dynamic way of exploring oral histories and other audio material. Users can listen to interviews while simultaneously reading the corresponding textual transcript, explore individual excerpts, or listen to interviews in their entirety. Read more.

Side-by-side display of Spanish and English transcript

Through the DIL’s collaboration with UNC-CH Communications Studies Professor Renee Alexander Craft in 2013, DH Press was updated to support bilingual oral history delivery, a feature developed for her DIL/IAH Fellows project, Digital Portobelo: Art + Scholarship + Cultural Preservation.  For her project Craft not only needed to support Spanish language oral histories, she also wanted the interviews to be accessible to Spanish and English speakers. Pam Lach and Michael Newton worked with her to develop the capacity to display two transcripts, side-by-side, for every streaming audio file (which required producing two unique transcripts for every interview, one in Spanish and the other in English). In this way, users can read the Spanish and English transcripts as they listen to the (mostly) Spanish interviews. And in the case of interviews where only one transcript exists (as with Sandra Eleta, for which no Spanish transcript currently exists), DH Press defaults to displaying just the one transcript.

They also made the transcripts easier to read by adding a scrollable box of transcript text that appears just below the audio.