For the past three years I’ve been working with the folks at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy to make temporal media – in this case oral history interviews – easier to use.

The open source InSite publishing system we’ve built to enable Duke’s Rutherfurd Living History website connects a video to its transcript at the sentence level. The transcript and video appear on the screen at once and can be annotated with supporting content, including links, images and maps. Viewers can use the transcript to navigate and search the video. Viewers can also share any excerpt, or list of excerpts, at the sentence level.

The Our Research section of the Living History site details the publishing system and also the workflow of best practices for recording, transcribing and organizing interviews to get them ready to publish.

Here’s a brief tour starting from the David Fahrenthold interview:

Click on the Facebook or Twitter symbols to share what you’ve highlighted plus a direct sentence-level link on social media. Or click on the link to copy the excerpt and direct link.

And email it:

Add more quotes to make a quote playlist:

The interactive transcripts also contain annotations that point to supporting content – the example below shows three annotations. The open one contains an external link. The viewer can open multiple annotations at once.

Take an interactive interview for a spin yourself at livinghistory.sanford.duke.edu  – don’t forget to try sharing your favorite quotes!

Related: See Putin gets the Interactive Transcript Treatment for a brief tour of a FRONTLINE project that was based on the InSite System.