My name is Silvia Calamai and I work at the University of Siena in Arezzo
I'm a general linguist a specialist in dialects
Over the years I have collected, catalogued, and digitized
oral archives of Tuscan origin from the 70's onwards
This huge amount of material consisting of spoken and sung Tuscan
Needs to be studied, by linguists
Not only by linguists, but also by linguists
Voice Technologies can provide us with tools to facilitate our work
Through systems of automatic alignment and speech recognition
This would greatly facilitate the research of those interested
in Sociological perspective of phonetics, sociolinguistics
It would allow to see the changes in phonetic aspects in pronunciation, accents, intonation
Which have occurred over the last 70 years in one region
This work done manually is time consuming, takes time long, is dispersive
If we succeed through the support of CLARIN
and through a dialogue with technologists
If we can find common ground, create a shared vocabulary
We eventually could get a huge amount of data
That could be analyzed from a socio-phonetic point of view
And we could describe it with a reliable database that could be verified by the community
We could describe on the basis of a sound and verifiable database
the phonetic changes that have occurred within one region, not only
We the automatization of the workflow of the transcription chain is successful
We could make a great amount of sound data available through reading
The wonderful thing about oral archives is that they are at a cross road
of disciplines that are quite distinctive,
The oral historians, the socio-linguists, the sociologists, the economists, the geographers
The oral archives can be considered as a resource in an imaginary place
suitable to find paths to truly embark in interdisciplinary approaches to research.
Regarding my discipline, we only have to take advantage of it
On the other hand, Voice Technology faces a big challenge
To be able to create models of automatic speech recognition
Strong enough to be able to perform well in speech with strong regional dialectical features
It is material that has not been created in isoloation in an experimental setting.
Informal everyday talk offers a very strong challenge on the technological side
Who has oral archives, should open them up and make them accessible
should be willing to digitize and catalogue the material, to describe it and share it with the community
And technologists should be ready and available to talk to humanists
To make a common effort and come to richer and fuller of research results
make it accessible and store archive
Regardless of the discipline accessible and even interrogative
Find the way to put it on a common vocabulary with the world of technology
Sometimes hard or hard to understand them
Technologists but I feel that the existing technicians are struggling to understand the humanists
Then this can be a very fertile ground for us but also for them