Three very interesting web sites came my way in the last few days, all dealing with the spoken word. Each is a fascinating resource with lots of potential for teaching and research.<\/p>\n

The goal of Historical Voices<\/a> is “to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century – the first large-scale repository of its kind. Historical Voices will both provide storage for these digital holdings and display public galleries that cover a variety of interests and topics.” The current galleries point to a wide variety of rich content, and the site features excellent Research and Education areas that include lesson plans, tips for creating aural resources, and example lessons. Historical Voices uses a Flash-based player for audio files stored on its own site, but you may find that you’ll need a variety of audio players (e.g., Real Player) for some of the off-site links.<\/p>\n

Talking History<\/a> takes a somewhat different approach to preserving and presenting aural history. Their mission–“to provide teachers, students, researchers and the general public with as broad and outstanding a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, commentaries, archival audio sources, and other aural history resources as is available anywhere”–is similar to that of Historical Voices (above). To implement their mission, Talking History produces a series of eponymous weekly radio\/Internet broadcasts which are archived on the web site and are fully searchable. Other educational and production resources are available as well. Aural files are accessible through Real Player or may be listed to as mp3 files with QuickTime Player, iTunes, or virtually any media player.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is the Speech Accent Archive<\/a>. This site “uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.” It provides a fascinating way to explore different accents. Speakers are categorized by biographical data (age, gender, birthplace, native language, age of English acquisition, etc.) and their speech is carefully transliterated into a native phonetic inventory which is thoroughly documented on the site. You can browse for speakers by language or region, and there is an excellent bibliography of language resources and links to related web sites. The audio files are in QuickTime (.mov) format.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three very interesting web sites came my way in the last few days, all dealing with the spoken word. Each is a fascinating resource with lots of potential for teaching and research. The goal of Historical Voices is “to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,8],"tags":[119,98,97,99],"class_list":["post-49","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-tools","tag-audio","tag-database","tag-history","tag-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":179,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49\/revisions\/179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skipvia.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}