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| Objectives |
| Process |
| Collection |
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Process
InSounds: An On-Line Oral History of Marshall McLuhan
The initial collection is a set of oral history tapes and interviews amassed by Dr. Liss Jeffrey for her doctoral dissertation "The heat and the light of Marshall McLuhan", and by the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology and the McLuhan Global Research Network. Throughout the 2002/2003 academic term, this collection of analog tapes was re-engineered by Dave Harkness, a masters candidate in Museum Studies at the University of Toronto and former student at the McLuhan Program, into digital format.
In this process, analog tapes were recorded to .wav file format through Sonic Foundry's Soundforge. A second copy in .cda (CD Audio) format was created for archiving, and for the ability to listen to these files on external audio devices. The audio files were equalized through an external audio mixer. Some post-processing of the files was also conducted through Soundforge. This included normalization between files (roughly equal volume output levels) and equalized (appropriate balance of low- to high-range frequencies). For files with excessive levels of ambient "white" noise, noise reduction processes ("gates" and filters) were applied.
The interface for the MP3 audio files is the open-source scripting language MING. More compressed versions of the audio files are also available through Real Audio format. MING is a Python-based language that runs as a module of PHP. MING and PHP are server-side scripts, meaning that the processes that occur to access the database run on the server, and not on the client's CPU. MING pulls information from a server-side database, generates SWFs "on the fly ", and streams the MP3 as a Flash movie. This interface was designed through coursework at the Curriculum and Technology branch of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (OISE), U of T.
This project will continue in the fall of 2003 as an extension of the McLuhan Oral History project, as a major component of Dr. Liss Jeffrey's graduate seminar, Understanding Media and McLuhan, at U of T, and as a project by Dave Harkness. New content in the form of audio as well as video will be added at this time.
Inquiries about support for this not for profit project are most welcome to: oral-history@mcluhan.org
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