FONTI 4.0

INNOVATIVE USE OF DIGITALIZED ORAL SOURCES THROUGH THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF THE CREATIVE INDUSTRY 4.0

Fonti 4.0 aims to create innovative tools for the analysis, use and enhancement of historical sound documents. In particular, the project focuses on oral sources on magnetic tape, produced by historians, anthropologists, linguists, etc., which testify to the history, culture, and language of the territory from the early decades of the twentieth century until today which are crucial for the conservation of territorial identity and inclusion.

These documents represent an important source of cultural wealth and, if properly valued, an economic and employment resource. The number of analogue archives that are discovered and that need to be safeguarded / enhanced is growing rapidly including new digital sources that continue to be produced. To enhance these documents, it is necessary to know their content, making them searchable and therefore usable. Considering the vastness of the heritage, a "manual" analysis would be unsustainable. For this reason, the project wants to intercept the technological push of industry 4.0 to revolutionize their analysis and fruition process.

Transcription Chain

The only way to safeguard the content of magnetic tapes is digitization. The result of a conservation project usually consists of hundreds of hours of musical recordings. Listening to such recordings can take years, during which time these documents are not accessible. The Fonti 4.0 project aims to speed up this process for oral sources. The first step is to restore (if necessary) and make the content of the documents listenable. The second step involves using speech-to-text (STT) software to automatically transcribe the content of these documents. From the transcribed texts it will be possible to automatically extract information relating to people, places, dates, etc. thanks to named entity recognition (NER) algorithms. This information will then be searchable with an ad hoc interface.

Partners

The project is financed by the Regional Operational Program co-financed with the European Social Fund 2014-2020 of the Veneto Region. The members of the partnership are:

Centro di Sonologia Computazionale, DEI, UNIPD, IT  Principal Investigator

Cultural Heritage & Innovation Center, EPFL, CH

Digital Humanities Laboratory, EPFL, CH

ARCHiVe, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, IT

Mind@ware srl, IT

 

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