Accessing and Analysing Culturally Sensitive Content: Data Capsules, Extracted Features and Spatial Hypermedia

The long-term goal of the Ātea Project — which is part of New Zealand’s National Science Challenges — is to help build prosperous, culturally thriving and technology-driven Māori economies for future generations. To achieve this, a key element in the project is the development of a suite of digital tools centred around Māori identity that provide capabilities such as a speech-to-text recognition for Te Reo (the Māori language) and authentic cultural experiences through Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques. To this end we need to be able to store, access and analyse culturally sensitive content, and the approaches we are developing to achieve this is the focus of the seminar.

Two of the techniques that we utilize leverage a methodology known as non-consumptive research, pioneered by the HathiTrust Research Center. The HathiTrust are looking at the issue of performing computational analysis over its 15 million volume digital library in a way that does not infringe copyright. We have taken their Open Source Data Capsules platform, which they use for non-consumptive text analysis, and have been experimenting with it in the context of speech recognition. We have also utilised their Extracted Feature dataset — an alternative approach for making all of their content publically available in a copyright-safe way — and shown how this can be used to identify Māori language resources from within their vast collection. A third technique we are developing centres on an interactive Spatial Hypermedia editing environment that provides a cloud-based encrypted environment for fine-grained sharing of multimedia content.

About the speaker:
David Bainbridge is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato, and Director of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project. He is an advocate of open source software, and an active coder on the Greenstone digital library project, and the spatial hypermedia system, Expeditee. His research interests include multimedia content analysis, and human computer interaction in addition to digital libraries. He has published widely in these areas, including the book How to Build a Digital Library, with colleagues Ian Witten and Dave Nichols, now into its second edition. David graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Edinburgh University, UK as the class medalist, and undertook his PhD in Computer Science at Canterbury University, New Zealand as a Commonwealth Scholar.

Attendance is free but please register at email@voltaire.ox.ac.uk.