Verbal Culture

Presentation of verbal texts has always been very difficult. Unlike written texts, there is no easy way to index a sound recording. Since Natalie Kononenko first went to Ukrainian villages in 1998, she has been recording interviews with villagers. We have now digitized the first 200 hours of these recordings, and are digitizing more.

Svitlana Kukharenko, a graduate student in the Ukrainian Folklore Program at the University of Alberta, listened to these recordings. She used an "index of keywords" prepared by Natalie Kononenko to note down the times, in each mp3 recording, when these topics were discussed.

In the winter of 2005 Peter Holloway, a Member of the Ukrainian Folklore Centre, and Yue(Eric) Zhang, of the TAPoR Project, generated a web site where the 200 hours of recordings can be searched for any one of the "keywords". The results page lists the mp3 files which contain that "keyword". When one of these files is "clicked", the specific segment can be heard.

We think this is the first time such a large set of verbal texts has been indexed in this way.

Please let us know if you like this method.

To go to this page CLICK: http://projects.tapor.ualberta.ca/UkraineAudio/