39:42 Zack Ellis
Thank you. Fiona. Um, yeah. It's been really incredible to witness how you've been able to scale, um, the work in Connecticut and to be able to provide that kind of 1 to 1 service, and really excited to be partnering with you. Um, for any folks that are here that are thinking about collecting for America. 250 as Fiona mentioned, she UConn um, are here to also support, uh, those in other states that are, um, looking for that, uh, type of, uh, of help. Uh, and also HannaLore in Idaho is getting together her ongoing cohort, uh, programming. So, like Fiona said, you're not alone. Um, and, and we're building that community, um, like, uh, Tammy, you had mentioned in the, uh, in the chat, you know, it's great to be in a space full of like minded people. And we are definitely looking to galvanize, um, the community and supporting one another. Um, so I'd love to take this moment to walk through TheirStory a little bit and show make visible kind of how the work that Fiona and Lori have been talking about, how that becomes possible and the work that Doug has been doing at the Nunn Center. And also, what does it look like to incorporate some of those new types of tools and user interfaces and AI into a platform that can help you more effectively do your work and focus on building those relationships, capturing the stories, building those partnerships, and thinking about how to make those stories and and oral histories accessible. Use and engage with. Like Doug said, if it's not being engaged with, you know, it really minimizes the the potential value, uh, ultimately. So let's talk about that. Um, in, uh, in brief. So TheirStory, we are a purpose built platform for the end to end process of oral history and story management, making sense of, uh, of the stories across the across the community. I'm actually going to skip through a little bit just for the sake of time of the founding story of TheirStory. But in short, you know, as the grandson of a Holocaust Holocaust survivor, I was really moved when I used to be working out in Silicon Valley to record my own parents, and it really started on that basis with my own family. But since April of 2020, you know, there's over 120 organizations around the country. Uh, some of the major projects, like Doug talked about that, really, um, you know, was galvanizing oral history. Um, like the nine over 11 museum is is using our platform along with the folks here on the panel. Um, but the challenge that I think, um, you know, HannaLore, Fiona talked about, that TheirStory helps us start to alleviate for them is the fragmentation of having to stitch together all of these different tools that when you have, uh, organizations that may be under-resourced, um, it's really a capacity issue to be able to do oral history in audio visual storytelling at scale. And so what what I'll show in terms of the platform is how with an integrated solution that can really help to increase capacity and ease the process of something that we all know is incredibly valuable. And maybe we've done it as a one off, but it hasn't been sustainable up to up to this point. Um, so we'll walk through everything from remote capture and uploading existing audio and video to how that is all transcribed and indexed, edited, clipped, and then ultimately disseminated wherever you want to engage people, whether that's online or even we'll show a little bit about how, uh, for example, at UConn, they've been helping folks with in-person galleries and bringing the audio and video there as well. Um, and, uh, and as kind of Laurie pointed out, there's this structure and similar to what Fiona has done, where if you're looking to get started, whether it's with a statewide initiative or even just your own, uh, local project, uh, that we're really, um, building a model that is supportive of, uh, allowing something that even starts small as a proof of concept to scale. And this is just an example of what that sort of structure looks like in in Idaho. So let me share my screen on the actual software and we'll show the good stuff. Um, and I'll try to go, uh, for about ten minutes here. And if we have a couple questions and if anyone wants to stay on a little bit past 230, I can do that as well. So what we're looking at here is an example of Project Space. Uh, in TheirStory, uh, where we can host audio and video. Um, and as we were talking about before, uh, there's a couple ways to get started. If you have existing audio and video, uh, you can simply upload that to our system. It doesn't have to be recorded through the software. Um, and an example of this was in Pinellas County, Florida. They were trying to think about how to get started with, uh, America 250 and they had an existing oral history collection of about 40 interviews with the African American community from the 60s in Pinellas County, Florida, and they uploaded that content into TheirStory. And then using this kind of what Doug was talking about, some of the incredible tools that are becoming available, uh, around AI, they were able to, um, once they uploaded the, uh, those recordings actually customize the prompts, like you might write in a ChatGPT. Uh, and so what they did, for example, was, um, if I choose to customize this here, uh, Fiona mentioned some of the Connecticut themes. They took the themes from, um, America 250, uh, a um, it had that they had laid out. So power of the place, we the people American experiment. They gave us some definitions to each of these. And what that did was that actually allowed for the, um, the collection itself to become, uh, searchable, uh, by those, by those themes. So they could just say, uh, doing history and find all of the chapters across those interviews where, um, doing history was a theme and to go right to that audio. So really quickly being able to get get started even without having to conduct new interviews. Um, now if we're going to conduct new interviews, uh, there's a couple ways to do that. So one is you can actually record through our software and host, uh, calls, um, whether small group or interviews. You can also record asynchronously, like Fiona was mentioning. Uh, and so some folks are starting to create, say, landing pages, uh, where, uh, in TheirStory, once you walk through the process of creating a testimonial, uh, you can just get a link that you can send out to any number of people or in this case, you know, put it behind a landing page. Some folks are creating recording booths in their physical spaces, uh, where, um, they set up, uh, say like an iPad with that landing page. So when I click on the link as someone to share my story, I can add in my contact details. Uh, ethical collection is super important. Uh, the management of rights. This is one of the things that Doug really mentioned at the beginning. So these are the terms created by the organization, not by by TheirStory. Um, and once someone agrees to those, then they can be taken to a page where, uh, just like how you joined, uh, most video calls, uh, you can, you know, add a background, make sure your hair looks good, test your mic, whatever you need to do. Uh, and then ultimately, you enter into a page where you can see those questions, uh, that you've created in TheirStory, uh, and then go ahead and record when you're ready and you'll get just a few second countdown here, and then we'll know that the recording is working because the counter is ticking up, the record button is pulsing red, and when I'm done, I can just hit finish and review and after a couple seconds just to process, then that will take that individual to a page where they can one confirm their contact details. They can view back that recording, either record again, discard it, or go ahead and submit. And once they've submitted the recording, then they'll be redirected to wherever you, as the collecting organization, would like to redirect them. You can just specify that URL in TheirStory. And so if you're also doing like an in-person recording booth, then you might just redirect them back to the landing page so it's ready for the next person. And where did that recording go? If I go back into TheirStory and refresh my page, then we'll see. We have a new recording ala me. Uh, and we have those, uh, terms, um, attached as a part of the metadata. So also as you move the recording wherever you need to in other systems, that can be a part of that ethical use. Super important. And it's also being automatically transcribed and indexed. So as you start to build up more and more content, then the question becomes, well, how can we make use of it? And so if I wanted to start to curate by a theme, let's say immigration, I can do a search in TheirStory and that will pull up all the recordings where that search term is found, whether it's in the title, the description, or even down to the level of the index or transcript. And so if I click on a recording, we'll see that that search pulls through both to the level of the index. So in this case one might talk about the immigrant experience for ten minutes. But never mention that phrase. How would we pull out those cross-cutting themes? This, again, is that same idea of how we were able to pull out the themes for America 250 for Pinellas County. Um, and you can see the full index that's automatically generated by TheirStory here, where you get that sort of chapter, uh, structure. Uh, but that search also pulls down to the level of the transcript. So maybe you want to see where someone mentioned that, uh, particular idea. Um, if I, if I click on any word in the transcript, it'll skip to that moment in the media so we can easily go back, find that place. Students have found this incredibly useful when they're interviewing. They can focus more on being present and then say, okay, what was that question I asked? Or the thing they said, go back, find it. And then if you want to make use of that content, say on social media to highlight, uh, your programming or your work or to embed on your own website, you can just highlight that part of the transcript that you want to use and say create clip. And I'm just going to add a title here. We're all immigrants at this time, which is kind of the sentiment of this passage. I'll give it a keyword to say demo, and that will automatically generate a clip that you can download as its own audio or video file, or even share directly, um, with someone or embed on on your own website. So, uh, while that one's processing, I'll just grab this other clip, uh, and show how that can easily then be shared out just by URL. And here we have that recording, um, with the interactive transcript that's searchable. Um, and then you can also embed on your own website. Um, if I go back here to share, uh, we give you a simple embed code and what that looks like, uh, is here's an example of the 92nd Street y, uh, who is starting to embed, uh, the recordings with our accessible video player and audio player on their own website. Now, as you want to start to curate more of that content, then you can even do that. Not just single recordings or clips at a time, but actual galleries of content. So I'll just say 850 demo test and you can start to go in. And here's that recording I just did. You can curate any number of recordings that you want to share. This is just a bunch of demo content and any clips that you have created. And ultimately just with a couple clicks and adding a logo or banner, or if you want to customize the color palette at all, you can do that and just in a minutes time in that case, or maybe a few more if you're trying to thoughtfully add, uh, which recordings you want to add, uh, then you have something that is, uh, publicly shareable, just like what I was just showing with an individual, uh, recording. And here's that recording I just did a moment ago. Um, and, uh, just like the individual clips, um, and recordings you can share that also via a QR code or embed it. And so here's an example of an organization that used the galleries and actually the testimonial feature after an in-person event, they used the testimonials to have people record their thoughts on the program and then curate that in a gallery that they put into their own website. Uh, and even folks at UConn, for example, uh, are putting this into physical exhibits where they're embedding those QR codes in the exhibit space itself. So if someone wants to access it via their phone, they can do that really easily. Um, one of the last things that I'll, that I'll show is starting to to redact or edit content and create things like highlight reels can take a lot of time. Uh, and so, uh, one of the things that, uh, we are building out now is not only can you clip content, but you can also start to edit content just as easily as you would edit text, uh, where I can just say, uh, let me add this little bit to this remix over here. And not just from one recording, but maybe I want to do that across multiple recordings and adding things like title slides or transitions between recordings and so on. Um, so making it really simple to then be able to, uh, create content that you can share, engage your audiences with, um, as well. Um, all all of this, uh, is are things that are now kind of newly possible. And there's even more, uh, around preservation. I would definitely recommend checking out, uh, our partners, permanent org, uh, a number of organizations we partner with who might not already have a preservation system. This is something that Doug mentioned at the beginning, uh, whether it's partnering with a university or archive, uh, or even for your own institution, looking at something like permanent, I would highly, highly recommend, um, with that, I know we have just a few minutes. Um, and that's certainly not everything, but I think a good, uh, a good smattering of what's possible, uh, today. So let's take a look if there are any questions folks wanted to ask. So I see here, uh, Marianne said, uh, who oversees the clips? Transcripts. If a if a self story is done and the content is not within the parameters of the prompts or questions, yeah, that's a great, great question. So ultimately the TheirStory space itself is a private space where you can monitor, uh, the recordings that are coming in. Um, and then you only publish or share that content out, um, if you choose, and you only invite people into your private space in TheirStory, um, uh, that you want to, uh, to have access. Uh, no. Fiona or Anna, Laurie, um, or Doug, anything that you would want to share.
