If you read the news about our project to create the “To the Best of Our Knowledge” Special Collection in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, you might have wondered how searchable shows will be, and if you could read an interview in addition to listening.
One of the wondrous parts of joining the archive, which is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and Boston-based GBH to preserve the significant public radio and television of our time, is that every show will be accompanied by an AI-generated transcript. On the one hand, it would be unlikely for all 35 years of shows to be transcribed by people in our lifetime. But there’s a catch. AI sometimes gets names wrong, doesn’t always get the syntax of sentences right and still needs help with the human side of writing.
So the AAPB uses “FIX-IT +,” a crowdsource tool for fixing transcripts. It’s kind of like how anyone can go in and (theoretically) make Wikipedia entries more accurate. It’s so fitting for this treasure trove of public media to not only offer the archives for free to anyone, but to welcome the public itself to make them continuously better.
Our colleagues at AAPB just let us know too that Yahoo has chosen the TTBOOK Special Collection for their employees to fix as part of their global “Yahoo for Good Day,” a virtual and in-person volunteer day this month. But it won’t be limited to one day – Yahoo will keep the project up on their intranet year-round for employees to go in and volunteer whenever they have time. I love the idea that Yahoo workers around the world will be getting to know the interviews, stories and history of TTBOOK.
On September 18, the AAPB is hosting a “Transcript-A-Thon” in person at the Boston Public Library to get more people involved and learn about becoming what they call “citizen archivists.”
It's a great example of AI and humans working “together” to create something that might not have been otherwise possible. And here’s where you come in, dear listeners – you too can fix TTBOOK transcripts as you read and listen to shows that are new to you, or that you might remember hearing someday in the past. With gratitude -
– Shannon