University of Texas at Austin

Enabling a New Scale of Conversational Speech Archives via Crowdsourcing, a three-year research project conducted by Assistant Professor Matthew Lease of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, focuses on content developed by groups (crowdsourcing) in combination with transcription technology. Lease will investigate the MALACH oral history of Holocaust eyewitnesses in order to identify more cost-effective preservation and curation practices and develop more scalable practices that can be applied to conversational speech archives at large. He will conduct a content analysis of the capabilities and limitations of six crowdsourcing platforms, pilot test methods for task and evaluation, scale and refine methods and evaluation, and rigorously evaluate and analyze his findings to test two hypotheses about crowdsourcing practices and technology use.