Category Archives: History

Interactive Interview Ahead of the Jan. 6 Hearings: Democracy and a High-Stakes Tweet

It’s time for an update on Frontline Transparency Project source interviews. In contrast to larger projects, which include several dozen source interviews from a given documentary posted at the same…

An Early Look at Some of the Source Interviews for ‘Putin’s Road to War’

The latest addition to the library of interactive transcripts that I’ve been helping PBS Frontline build are the source interviews for Putin’s Road to War, a Frontline documentary airing tonight….

Warnings From Recent History About Facebook’s Threat to Democracy

One way to get some perspective on the news Facebook has been part of this week – the whistleblower testimony, and the outage on Monday – is to take a…

Interactive Transcripts from the Coronavirus Front Lines

Frontline published a series of articles about Covid-19 in April. Two of the articles link to more material from the main subject of the story: an interactive transcript thanks to…

Tapping History’s Perspective

There’s nothing like a long sit-down with someone who’s been through some history to put things in perspective. Try listening to this Frontline interview with Maria Ressa from last year…

Direct Links – With or Without Text

We’ve made an incremental improvement to the open source interactive transcript system behind Duke University’s Rutherfurd Living History site. You’ve always been able to share the text of a quote…

Dragon Christmas List 2018

Fifteen years ago there were thriving speech input users’ groups. I spent a lot of time at the groups in Boston and New York. In late 2003 the Boston users…

Making History More Accessible…
and Sometimes Stunningly Informative (part 3)

Here’s another quote playlist from the Putin Files that resonates with what’s going on today. The Putin Files are the interactive source interviews from the PBS Frontline documentary Putin’s Revenge,…

Making History More Accessible…
and Sometimes Stunningly Informative, (part 2)

In part 1, I dug through the interactive transcripts in the Rutherfurd Living History archive for quotes from as long as 37 years ago that resonate today. It’s also informative…

Making History More Accessible…
and Sometimes Stunningly Informative (part 1)

One aim of interactive transcripts is to make history more accessible, and thus more informative. An oral history collection is a snapshot of a given person at a certain point…