my name's Louise courting I work in a data
archive the curate state of a social scientists in the
UK our collection spans a huge variety of material
from from the twentieth century covering some very large surveys
through too many quilts that's a quality material now in
the UK I think many social scientists have come
to use our collections are predominately obsessed with using text
so we have a few audio recordings that are typically
not consulted in a multi media age in a digital
age shall we should be thinking more about enabling them
to access these materials unfortunately some of the the ways
of delivery and the mode of accessing this material it's
actually quite a barrier for for researchers to come and
use that I think with the advent of speech technology
and retrieval methods we will be able to do so
so much more and enable them to go one step
forward and not just use the flat text so want
to give an example of about wonderful data set that
we have and that was conducted in the nineteen seventies
as part of a large research study and that was
interviews with about five hundred people mainly from working class
cities and rural areas in the UK and it
was looking at the edwardian period in england and that's
the first decade of the twentieth century asking people to
think about life at home work politics religion so many
marion many emotional areas were covered and you think about
it this was done in the seventies they were asked
to reflect on the period before the first world war
but actually they're asked to reflect before that period and
they were not encouraged to talk about the war itself
so it's a huge rich collection and it's been used
many many times but it's only the tax that's been
accessed and if you think about the amount of emotion
that's in the text and the local dialect would have
been used at the time that's not exploited and I
feel that that could be very rich exploited one example
of an interesting way of using the material was um
a guy called micro person who looked at that used
to psychoanalytic and styled had to go and look at
older material from from the first world war and he
was looking at soldier's experiences of being in the trenches
and how their relationships with their families help mediate against
that the stress the stress of the facts of that
but you just use the text and you can imagine
that having access to the rich material the audio people
talking about very emotional experiences I think you would get
a much a much enriched experience from that so I
would like to think that we can go forward and
offer and people are much more than flat text another
example that he had many photographs from this collection which
are not used at all and and if you think
if you put together the audio the images the taxed
you can have an enriched situation so I really hope
that that is the future we can use for the
speech and language technologies to encourage a social scientist sister
to think a little bit more creatively