General Framework
Digital Exhibit

Purpose

The purpose of our project was to define a procedure for the digital presentation of oral histories. We wanted to present a “proof of concept” which could be easily modeled and consequently easily followed. We felt that focusing on a limited, discrete, definable topic, such as groups of interviews that would have supporting textual and graphical documentation, as well as audio files, would allow us to demonstrate the multiple—and simultaneous—options for displaying such information for a relatively wide audience.

Conceptually the project was divided into two parts. The goal of the first part was to establish a framework for a large-scale digitization project, such as the work currently being done in Documenting the American South at UNC-CH. The goal of the second part was to exhibit a related group of digitized interview components on the World Wide Web (WWW). This report describes the two main goals of the project in greater detail, including descriptions of the important steps required to meet each goal. Indications of helpful tools and resources as well as areas of future work are included in this analysis.

Background

The oral histories and accompanying visuals used in this project were provided by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). The SOHP holds over 1600 interviews documenting the actions of a wide variety of contributors to southern history. Specifically, we worked with three interviews from the Listening for a Change project, an ambitious new oral history project involving a team of historians recording the actions of North Carolina communities with respect to race and public schools, environmental issues, and the local impact of the changing global economy. Our interviews, conducted by project coordinator Kathy Newfont, chronicled the battle over public land use in the Appalachian South and the origins of grassroots environmentalism.

The SOHP is currently considering ways to make more of its material available to researchers and the general public via the WWW, and was consequently very happy to cooperate with our project. The SOHP requested that we work within the Listening project, feeling the goals of our project matched nicely with one of Listening's main goals: to share its discoveries through a wide range of media, from community and educational forums to books and articles to WWW sites.

Process

I. General Framework

We sought to establish a durable process for digitizing text and audio in a manner that would allow for easy and powerful application integration (e.g. with browsers, search engines, media players, etc.). To this end, we decided to base the digitization on the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML), a WWW-friendly sub-set of SGML and widely considered to be the next generation mark-up language for the WWW.

XML represents a happy medium between SGML and HTML, offering the richness and flexibility of SGML while maintaining the web portability and simplicity of HTML. XML is often referred to as a “meta-language,” as it is not a instance of a mark-up language but rather a universal format for creating mark-up definitions. Using XML, we aimed to create a customized mark-up language which could capture the elements of an oral history in a meaningful and powerful manner, allowing for enhanced data searching, presentation, and interchange.

The scope of this part of the project included three steps: 1) Define the mark-up language through the creation of a Document Type Definition (DTD); 2) Apply the mark-up language to the oral history transcripts/audio cassettes; 3) Create a style sheet that could render the XML-defined data in a WWW browser in meaningful way.

Step One: DTD (See Appendix I)
The goal for this first step was to produce a thorough yet flexible definition for the type of oral histories found in the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP). To this end, we reviewed the collection descriptions maintained on the SOHP web site and spoke with Linda Sellars, the librarian most familiar with the collection. Through this research, we identified 27 elements and 37 attributes relevant to an oral history.

The next step was to name the elements and attributes. Hoping to make our mark-up as interoperable with other similar mark-up activities, we searched for naming precedence based on existing, related DTD’s. Unfortunately, we were unable to discover an existing tag set highly applicable to our document set. TEI Lite, currently in use in the Documenting the American South Project, proved to be too generic, although, we did borrow directly from this DTD when appropriate. Example elements from TEI include name, term, keyword, and unclear. We did find additional relevant tag sets with the SMIL markup, as discussed below.

Step Two: Document Mark-Up (See Appendix II)
Marking up the three oral histories in our sample proved to be a highly manual and time-consuming task, but a straight-forward task as well. It was straight-forward because we had a thorough knowledge of both the DTD and the documents, so there was no difficulty in associating elements and attributes with the respective document text. The task was still time-consuming, however, as we had fifty pages of text and decided to use as many optional elements and attributes as possible to demonstrate the robustness of the DTD. Also, because the interviews used had yet to be catalogued, identifying the values for some of the attributes (e.g. interviewerBio, intervieweeBio, projectDescription) required extra research.

Step Three: Style Sheet (See Appendix III)
Prior to the release of Internet Explorer 5.0 (IE5), XML could not be displayed in a WWW browser. To display XML documents in IE5 in non-mark-up format, a style sheet must be used. There are three basic options here:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – The current styling mechanism for HTML, CSS provides an easy way to render XML documents. With ease comes limitations, however. For example, CSS can only display elements in the order in which they appear in the document.
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) client side—A very powerful and flexible styling language under development by the W3C. The most straight forward application of XSL transforms XML in HTML by embedding XSL elements and attributes within an HTML template. (Any other client side friendly languages, such as javascript, can also be integrated within the XSL style sheet. Without server side processing, however, XSL styled XML can currently only be viewed in Internet Explorer 5.0.
XSL server side – Transforming documents to HTML via XSL on the server side allows for documents to be rendered in any HTML capable browser.

Because we wanted the flexibility of XSL without the challenge of server side processing (e.g. cgi scripting) we opted to render our oral histories through client side processed XSL. To overcome the Netscape limitation, we produced comparable HTML versions of all XML-backed documents.

II. Digital Exhibit

We also sought to develop an area to exhibit digitizations of the various artifacts that accompany and enrich the oral history. Such artifacts include the transcript of the interview, the audio file of the interview, relevant photographs of the interviewees, and the photographic documentation of their experiences. We wanted, however, to present these artifacts such that they would offer the fullest functionality possible, and thus benefit as diverse a user population as possible. This required multiple presentations, where these artifacts were available as individual units in one presentation, where in another presentation, they were integrated into related units.

Step One: Image and Audio File Gallery
For users looking to this information source to conduct a “dissection” of the materials contained within, we created a gallery from which they could select individual images. Additionally the sound files accompanying the transcripts of the interviews are available (see discussion of future work). This allows users who desire to study the details of the information in a manner that needs only a single format (at least at a time), for analysis. An example of this might be a linguist interested in studying the audio files for dialect or accents particular to individuals living in Western North Carolina in the 1980’s-1990’s.

The process of digitizing the materials was somewhat involved. SOHP had already digitized the image files using a scanner, and thus gave us digitized image files. The audio files, however, were given to us in mixed formats. One set of interviews was given to us in digital form (.ra); the other two sets were given to us in cassette tape form. We consulted with Todd Stabley, Andy Brawn, and James Hepler—multimedia and sound and video services consultants at the Center for Instructional Technology at UNC—to determine the best way to digitize and serve the audio files. We followed their recommended procedures for recording the audio files from the cassette tapes into wav. and au. file formats. We then edited the audio files so as to have shorter excerpts (that would also be more appropriate for the SMIL presentation). Finally, we converted the .wav and .au files to .rm files.

Step Two: File Synchronization (See Appendix IV
For users desiring more of an overall conceptual understanding of the movement itself, who would be aided by a presentation of related artifacts for a given subject—such as being able to hear the interview while seeing relevant images from the period—we created an integrated view which combined such related artifacts. We synchronized these files using the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL), an XML application designed to define the presentation of synchronized multimedia (e.g. in RealPlayer). We used the composer to generate a file which combined an excerpt from one of the digitized interviews Monroe Gilmore) with the digitized photos SOHP provided for us.

Once we had the SMIL file, we then associated it with the XML files we had created. As mentioned above, we looked to find existing tag sets applicable to our audio set. We found that the DTD for SMIL did include some audio decarlations. Based on an increasing prevalence of SMIL players, we decided to employ a subset of the audio tags defined in SMIL to define the audio properties of the interview.

Tools

In keeping with our mission to demonstrate an easily replicable process, we looked for tools that were easily accessible both literally in the sense of ease of acquisition, as well as figuratively in the sense of learning to use the tools adeptly.

XML Management
For this task, we relied heavily on XML Authority (Extensibility, Inc.), a popular XML schema management tool. The XML Authority interface makes it easy to declare elements and attributes within a DTD construct, and facilitates the definition of where, when, and how often elements and attribute can appear within an instance document. Another benefit of XML Authority is its affordability. While we used an older version of XML Authority available in the SILS Computing Lab, the most recent version can be downloaded from the www.extensibility.com for under one hundred dollars.

XML Data Entry
While Notepad is a capable mark-up tool, schema-aware instance editors make this process much easier. Tools such as XML Instance (Extensibility) or XML Spy (Icon Information-Systems) provide a structured, organized view of XML documents, facilitating data entry. Each tool also has validation capabilities, ensuring that the document remains within the bounds outlined by the DTD. Limited use trial versions of both products are available via the WWW and proved adequate for the purposes of our project.

XSL Style Sheets
Due to its working draft status, there are very few applications designed to facilitate the creation of XSL style sheets. For the sake of learning, we decided not to rely on any external software for this part of the project.

Audio File Digitization and Editing
Based on the advice of the multimedia experts we consulted, we used Goldwave to digitize and edit the sound files. The software package is shareware, and was fairly easy to access and learn to use. We feel that for users interested in digitizing their audio archives, Goldwave is appropriately accessible, while at the same time providing enough feature richness to allow for quality recording and editing. We also used RealProducer to convert the files from .wav and .au to .rm. RealProducer also is shareware, and is quite easy to learn to use.

SMIL Creation
Based on the recommendations of the W3C site, we reviewed several SMIL composer packages. Of the various recommendations listed there, we felt that, as with GoldWave, SuperToolz SMIL Composer was fairly intuitive and yet sophisticated enough to suit our purposes. Given more time and more access to other tools, we would have liked some additional functionality; but in looking for a widely available tool to use for SMIL creation, we feel that SuperToolz would be sufficient for the task.

Lessons Learned and Future Work

Working with XML
Our original intent was to create the definitive DTD for the SOHP based upon analysis of the oral history collection, input from the collection’s various stakeholders, and the precedence established by DTD’s created for similar environments. We quickly learned that a robust DTD design, in itself, could amount to a semester-long project. Because further progress (mark-up, styling) was dependent upon a working DTD, we were unable to perform research to the level we initially intended. While the DTD shown in Appendix I was marked by considerable thought and many iterations, our “best effort” product will likely require modifications as a more varied group of people use it to mark up a more varied group of instance documents. Also, widespread use of the DTD will require the creation of an annotated specification clearly outlining the meanings for each element and attribute.

The most obvious area for future work is the design of a domain-specific search engine based on the oral history tag set as defined by the DTD and implemented in the document mark-up. Clearly the ability to search for an interview about Appalachian environmentalism, using “Asheville” as a keyword, with transcripts and pictures, without restrictions, is a strong advantage over HTML-based searching. An ambitious search engine would not only return relevant “hits” at the interview level, but would be able to slice up audio files and return relevant clips matching the searcher’s query. Imagine, for example, someone wishing to attempt to transcribe sections reported on a transcript as unclear, being able to query for and receive all of the audio clips in a certain series with previously unintelligible audio. Given the audio mark-up facilities (Appendix IV), another obvious enhancement to our work would be to create an application which coordinates a mouse click on a certain area of the text with the corresponding position within the audio file.

The areas of future work with regards to XSL are limitless, as entire books are currently being written on XSL's diverse functionality. IE5 supports only a fraction of the advertised capabilities of XSL (and related technologies such as XPath and XLink), and we employed only a fraction of IE5’s capabilities. The important point here is that XSL goes beyond the mere styling capabilities of CSS to allow for on-the- fly data manipulation.

Working with Multimedia
Our original understanding was that the audio files would be in digital form. Hence, the digitization of the audio became a new, unexpected responsibility for this project. Although this addition required us to shift attention and resources from other areas we had planned, we saw this change as advantageous, in that we were able to more fully model a complete process of digitization of the various materials related to the interviews. (The image files were in digital form when we received them; but we feel that many potential digital librarians will likely have more experience with digitizing image files than with digitizing audio files, and that our model will therefore be useful to a wide audience of users.)

We experienced various levels of success in digitizing the audio files. We found it an unwieldy process to first digitize to the .wav and .au files, and then convert to .rm; but the multimedia consultants we spoke with were fairly adamant about feeling that this was the best process. Additionally, we found the files to be extremely large, which adversely affects their performance in the SMIL file, and thus makes the presentation less available to users on a dialup modem. The next logical step, then, would be to edit the excerpts we’ve chosen into smaller units, so that they’re more accessible to a wider audience. Also, since we only have excerpts from two of the interviewees, we’d like to add the rest of the audio files that accompany their interviews. Finally, we would like to find out if SOHP would be interested in taking the file synchronization to another level of integration—including the integration of text clips with—or instead of—the photos currently presented with the sound file.

Working with Content
While the goal of this project was to provide a representation of what could be done with various content types, we hope that our representation will not limit the scope of what kinds of information are considered for the site. More specifically, it is our hope that as future scholars add to the site, they look to add additional content types to the site, and thus broaden the scope of the information delivered there. Specifically, we feel that the site offers relevant information directly related to the interviews; from here, however, we would like to see the inclusion of additional documentation—such as maps and external documentation on the political situation revolving around the actions of the interviewees.

Appendix

Appendix I – Document Type Definition

<!ENTITY % audioclip " src CDATA #IMPLIED

format CDATA #IMPLIED

title CDATA #IMPLIED

clip-begin CDATA #IMPLIED

clip-end CDATA #IMPLIED">

<!ELEMENT interview (audio )>

<!ATTLIST interview transcript (y | n ) #IMPLIED

restrictions CDATA #IMPLIED

closed (y | n ) #IMPLIED

copyrightHolder CDATA #IMPLIED

abstract (y | n ) #IMPLIED

callNumber CDATA #IMPLIED

microfilm (y | n ) #IMPLIED

relatedMaterials CDATA #IMPLIED

seriesLetter CDATA #IMPLIED

seriesName CDATA #IMPLIED

intervieweeName CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewerName CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewLocation CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewDate CDATA #IMPLIED

tapeNumber CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewerBio CDATA #IMPLIED

intervieweeBio CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewNumber CDATA #IMPLIED

collectionDescription CDATA #IMPLIED

collectionName CDATA #IMPLIED

collectionNumber CDATA #IMPLIED

seriesDescription CDATA #IMPLIED

interviewerTitle CDATA #IMPLIED

intervieweeTitle CDATA #IMPLIED

projectDescription CDATA #IMPLIED

projectName CDATA #IMPLIED >

<!ELEMENT audio (openingAnnouncement? , exchange , closing? )>

<!ATTLIST audio length CDATA #IMPLIED

numberOfTapes CDATA #IMPLIED

recordType (stereo | mono ) #IMPLIED

tapeSpeed CDATA #IMPLIED

originalFormat (cassette |

cartridge |

reel |

disc |

roll |

film |

digital ) #IMPLIED >

<!ATTLIST openingAnnouncement %audioclip;

cassetteSide CDATA #IMPLIED

cassetteNumber CDATA #IMPLIED >

<!ELEMENT interviewee (name , title? )>

<!ELEMENT interviewer (name , title? )>

<!ELEMENT title (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT intDate (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST intDate e-dtype NMTOKEN #FIXED 'string' >

<!ELEMENT intLocation (street* , city? , state? , zip? )?>

<!ELEMENT intTopic (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT tapenum (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT interviewTitle (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT city (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT state (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT zip (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT street (#PCDATA )>

<!ELEMENT exchange (interviewerResponse , intervieweeResponse )>

<!ATTLIST interviewerResponse %audioclip;

cassetteSide CDATA #IMPLIED

cassetteNumber CDATA #IMPLIED >

<!ATTLIST intervieweeResponse %audioclip;

cassetteSide CDATA #IMPLIED

cassetteNumber CDATA #IMPLIED >

<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST name type (person | place | organization | historicalEvent ) #IMPLIED>

<!ATTLIST name %audioclip;>

<!ELEMENT date (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST date %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT unclear (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST unclear %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT term (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST term %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT keyword (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST keyword %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT pause (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST pause %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT laughter (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST laughter %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT interruption (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST interruption %audioclip; >

<!ELEMENT closing (#PCDATA )>

<!ATTLIST closing %audioclip;

cassetteSide CDATA #IMPLIED

cassetteNumber CDATA #IMPLIED >

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Appendix II – XML Document Excerpt

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<?xml-stylesheet href="javascript2.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

<!DOCTYPE interview SYSTEM "SOHP.dtd">

<interview collectionName="Southern Oral History Program, UNC-CH" collectionDescription="The Southern Oral History Program seeks to foster a critical, yet democratic understanding of the South -- its history, culture, problems and prospects. Interview tapes and indexes are preserved by the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library. There they will join the more than 1600 interviews we have already collected, which are among the archive's most heavily used materials. Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina Press, 1987), written by the Southern Oral History Program staff, is only one among the many books, films, and performance projects that oral history research has helped to inspire." collectionNumber="40.07" interviewerBio="Kathy Newfont is a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at UNC-CH and a

Project Coordinator with SOHP's 'Listening for a Change' project. She is

currently completing her dissertation, entitled 'Moving Mountains: Forest

Politics and Commons Culture in Western North Carolina, 1964-1994'. Kathy lives

in the Hominy Valley outside Candler, North Carolina." intervieweeBio="Monroe Gilmour is a resident of Black Mountain and a community organizer with a long record of social justice activism. He became involved in environmental work in 1987 when the Asheville-Buncombe Water Authority began clearcutting on the North Fork watershed near his home.

Gilmour brought his skills as a community organizer to a local citizens'

group opposed to the clearcutting. Building on his CACAW experience,

Gilmour worked with the Western North Carolina Alliance to launch a

region-wide 'Cut the Clearcutting' campaign aimed at halting clearcutting

on the region's national forests." transcript="y" restrictions="n" closed="n" copyrightHolder="UNC" abstract="n" callNumber="40.07 K152" microfilm="n" relatedMaterials="photos, video" interviewNumber="152" seriesLetter="K" seriesName="Southern Communities" projectName="Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition" projectDescription="The 'Listening for a Change' project uses oral history as a form of participatory documentation, a method of historical inquiry that encourages the active involvement of community members and their dialogue with each other. Launched by the Southern Oral History Program in 1998, the project involves a team of historians recording the life stories from a host of North Carolina's citizens in order to document unrecorded aspects of the state's twentieth century history. Researchers are sharing their findings through books, articles, exhibits, radio, tv, and World Wide Web sites, such as this one." seriesDescription="The Southern Communities Series contains interviews conducted in the course of community studies by students and faculty exploring questions of central concern to the humanities: What is the meaning of community? What role does historical memory play in helping people cope with loss, create new identities and communities, and become agents rather than victims of change?" intervieweeName="Monroe Gilmour" interviewerName="Kathy Newfont" interviewLocation="Black Mountain, NC" interviewDate="8-21-98" tapeNumber="8.21.98-MC">

<interviewerResponse src="http://www.afporch.org/interviews" format="RealAudio" title="Monroe Gilmour Interview" clip-begin="2s" clip-end="20s" cassetteNumber="1" cassetteSide="A">So did you call people or did people call you? How did this all get started?</interviewerResponse>

<intervieweeResponse src="http://www.afporch.org/interviews" format="RealAudio" title="Monroe Gilmour Interview" clip-begin="21s" clip-end="78s" cassetteNumber="1" cassetteSide="A">Well, I can't exactly remember. But I know that I did call people and ask them, "Did you see this?" And then we worked up a tour to go out and actually see it. And took several people and got some people that actually knew about forestry. I'm not sure at that time if I had ever heard the word "clear-cut" to be honest. And, also, for me it was kind of interesting too, because I had always seen environmental issues as sort of different from the kind of human issues that I'd been working with in India with starvation. And in Africa with the brutality of apartheid and people getting killed by parcel bombs. You know the environment always seems sort of like a luxury to work on that. It was quite an education because I came to realize that the same problems and the same people sometime are in both. And I see it much more as an integrated problem. And many times the one leads to the harm of the other.

</intervieweeResponse>

</exchange>

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Appendix III – Style Sheet

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl">

<xsl:template match="/">

<html>

<head>

function toolTips(evt,currElem) {

// Creates the tool tip for Internet Explorer

if ((navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")) {

tipWin = eval("document.all." + currElem + ".style");

// Number at end of next line indicates the number of pixels from the bottom of the cursor the tip is

tipWin.top = parseInt(evt.y)+2;

// Number at end of next line indicates the number of pixels to the left of the cursor the tip is

tipWin.left = Math.max(2,parseInt(evt.x)+15);

tipWin.visibility = "visible";

tipWin.status = "";

}

function tipDown(currElem) {

// Closes the tool tip for Internet Explorer

if ((navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer")) {

tipWin = eval("document.all." + currElem + ".style");

tipWin.visibility = "hidden";

}

</script>

#tipWin1,#tipWin2,#tipWin3,#tipWin4, #tipWin5, #tipWin6 {position:absolute;

visibility:hidden}

.tipWinStyle {background-color:#FFFFDD;

layer-background-color:#FFFFDD;

border-color:#000000;

border-width:1px;

border-style:solid;

font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;

font-size:9pt;

padding-left:2px;

padding-right:2px}

</style>

</xsl:for-each> Interview</title>

</head>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

An <a onmouseover="toolTips(event,'tipWin5'); return true" onmouseout="tipDown('tipWin5')">Interview</a> of

by <a onmouseover="toolTips(event,'tipWin3'); return true" onmouseout="tipDown('tipWin3')"><xsl:value-of select="@interviewerName"/></a>

<xsl:value-of select="@collectionName"/></a>

<xsl:value-of select="@seriesName"/> Series</a>

<xsl:value-of select="@interviewLocation"/>

<xsl:value-of select="@interviewDate"/>

</xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

<xsl:value-of select="@collectionDescription"/></xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">Call Number: <xsl:value-of select="@callNumber"/> Length: <xsl:value-of select="audio/@length"/> Related Materials: <xsl:value-of select="@relatedMaterials"/></xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

<xsl:value-of select="@intervieweeBio"/></xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

<xsl:value-of select="@seriesDescription"/></xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

<xsl:value-of select="@interviewerBio"/>

</xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview">

<xsl:value-of select="@projectDescription"/>

</xsl:for-each>

<xsl:for-each select="interview/audio/exchange">

<xsl:for-each select="/interview">

(<xsl:value-of select="@interviewerName"/>)

</xsl:for-each>--

</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>

<xsl:for-each select="/interview">

(<xsl:value-of select="@intervieweeName"/>)

</xsl:for-each>

</blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>

</xsl:for-each>

</body>

</html>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

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Appendix IV – SMIL tag sets used for document DTD

src CDATA #IMPLIED <!- - location of digital file - ->

format CDATA #IMPLIED <! - - type of digital file (.au, .ra .wav)

title CDATA #IMPLIED <!- - title of clip- - >

clip-begin CDATA #IMPLIED <!- - where clip begins within file -- >

clip-end CDATA #IMPLIED <!- - where clip ends within file - ->

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the folks at the Southern Oral History Program for their cooperation in securing the necessary materials and for their overall interest in our project, especially Elizabeth Millwood and Melynn Glusman.

We would also like to thank Linda Sellars, manuscripts librarian at the Southern Historical Collection for her insight during the DTD creation process and for her cooperation, along with her colleague Steve Weiss, during the audio transfer process.

Additionally, we would like to thank Kathy Newfont for the interesting interviews and the provision of the visuals and additional background information.

Finally, we would like to thank Todd Stabley, Andy Brawn, and James Hepler at the Center for Instructional Technology at UNC for their multimedia expertise and guidance.

The Southern Oral History Project

Addendum to “The American Front Porch”

Purpose

Background

Process

I. General Framework

II. Digital Exhibit

Tools

Lessons Learned and Future Work

Appendix II – XML Document Excerpt

Appendix IV – SMIL tag sets used for document DTD