Putin gets the Interactive Transcript Treatment

I’ve been working with with PBS FRONTLINE to enable its Putin Files interactive transcripts project. The system is based on the InSite system that we developed for Duke University’s Living History archive. We made interactive transcripts of the 70 hours of source interviews for Putin’s Revenge documentary shareable at the quote level.

An interactive transcript allows viewers to click text to navigate video, and to copy text to get a sentence-level link along with the text. Share what you copied and it takes just one click to hear the quote in context.

Here are a couple of shareable quotes from The Putin Files (you can do this with any excerpt from the 70 hours of interviews – select an excerpt, click to copy, then paste and you get the excerpt and direct link. There are also shortcuts to tweet and share on Facebook.):

He is a man who is obsessed with TV. He watches tapes of the evening news over and over and over again to see how he’s portrayed, to see how he looks. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/julia-ioffe/#1112

What Putin did when he came in was said: “OK, I’ve got a different project. We’re going to make”—if you will, to coin a phrase–“I’m going to make Russia great again”. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/james-collins/#206

There’s more about the InSite system on the Interactive Transcripts page.