Digital Library Center Blog | UF

With the upcoming release of Google Voice for everyone, extending from current Grandcentral users to include new users, transcribing audio could soon become a lot less difficult. In light of the potential for increased ease, people may soon be even more interested in conducting  oral histories. For those looking for information on how to conduct oral histories, Mark Greenberg at the University of South Florida has developed a number of great resources that are all conveniently organized together and printable from here.

Read more about the project that made it possible here, or skip right to the audio. I’m not sure if 1,000 files sound incredibly impressive to most users or not, but it should or we need to develop new methods of counting. 1,000 audio files is a lot of work and audio files have depth. With so many people working to lay the foundation for access by digitizing materials, so many others have already been building from and on them. We need more open materials to build with, and for a sense of space, place, time, and movement, we need music we can share, use, incorporate, recombine, and these 1,000 represent the files themselves and thousands upon thousands of connections and constellations.

The Florida Humanities Council has funded a project by the University of West Florida (and involving the University of South Florida and the University of Florida according to the The Gainesville Sun article) to create podcasts about historic Florida. The project will create these “Pastcasts” (I love the name!) for historic Florida towns and the programs will be available for download from the Florida Humanities Council website.

I’m excited to hear all of the programs, but most excited to hear the Pastcasts for Alachua County, and to hear the rest with an eye on ways to connect them to the photos, maps, and other materials related to historic Florida already in the University of Florida Digital Collections. Then, I get to work on mapping them within a spatial, audiovisual, textual format, but I have to wait until I can steal some free time since I have a few other mappings to make first. It’s very exciting to have these Pastcasts and to have a venue for more of them and for enriching them and using them to enrich other materials.