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Dear all,

I'm very pleased to announce another Digital music seminar at C4DM.  
On Tuesday 29th April, Professor Jerry Goldman will be talking about  
the OYEZ Project.

NB: This seminar is on *Tuesday* rather than the usual Wednesday.

The seminar will take place in room 105 in the Electronic Engineering  
Department, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London  
E1 4NS. Directions of how to get to Queen Mary are available at  
http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/research/seminars/ as are details of  
future seminars. The room is under access control, so people from  
outside QM will need to contact C4DM to get in - the lab phone number  
is +44 (0)20 7882 7986 and if I'm not available, anyone else in the  
lab should be able to help. If you are coming from outside Queen  
Mary's, please let me know, so I can make sure no-ones stuck outside  
the doors...

All are welcome to attend. If you wish to be added to / removed from  
our mailing list, please send me an email and I'll be happy to do so.

If you are unable to attend, we are intending to web-stream the  
seminar. Details on how to receive the stream are available at http:// 
www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/research/seminars/index.html as are videos of  
previous seminars.

Next seminar:
-------------------

16:00  Tuesday 29th April 2008

  "The OYEZ Project: How sport empowered the world's largest group  
spoken-word corpus"
Professor Jerry Goldman


Abstract
he hapless Chicago Cubs baseball team has not won a world  
championship in 100 years. It takes fortitude and a suspension of  
disbelief to support such a team. In 1989, at one such game, the idea  
for the Oyez Project took form. It rested on a metaphor familiar to  
American kids: the baseball card. Creating an electronic version of a  
card (using HyperCard) transformed analog ideas into digital reality.  
This included real-time update on performance stats, a virtual "tour"  
of the "playing field," the law-baseball quiz, and access to past  
"games." This last feature -- access to and sharing of -- all the  
U.S. Supreme Court's audio materials is the current heart of the Oyez  
Project.

The Oyez Project today is an archive of all audio materials recorded  
in the courtroom for the last 53 years. It amounts to about 9000  
hours of group interaction (with upwards of 12 participants per  
argument) recorded on reel-to-reel tapes for nearly the entire  
period. The audio quality varies considerably and imposes challenging  
engineering issues to render and share acceptable versions for public  
use. With excessive deliberateness, the Court finally switched to a  
digital recording system. Ironically, it now records to non-archival  
quality.

This talk will explain how the Oyez Project came into being and the  
current state of its holdings. It will also examine the engineering  
and administrative challenges to manage and deliver rich audio  
content to varied audiences worldwide. Today, the archive is about 55  
million words aligned to audio at the sentence level. When complete,  
the archive will exceed 100 million words aligned to audio at the  
sentence level.


Biography
Professor Goldman heads the OYEZ Project, a multimedia relational  
database devoted to the United States Supreme Court http:// 
www.oyez.org. With a major grant from the National Science  
Foundation, Goldman is working with collaborators in linguistics,  
psychology, computer science and political science to create a  
complete archive of 50 years of Supreme Court audio.

Goldman has been a several-time recipient of software awards from the  
American Political Science Association, including the 2005 APSA Best  
Instructional Website Award for IDEAlog, an application to analyze  
political values (created with Prof. Kenneth Janda) http:// 
www.idealog.org. He is also a recipient of the 1997 EDUCOM Medal and  
the 1998 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association for  
improving public understanding of law. In 2005, the Department  
awarded him the Farrell Teaching Prize for his long commitment to  
undergraduate teaching and advising.


If you'd like to present a seminar at C4DM, please get in touch, and  
we'll see what we can do.

Steve Welburn
--
Centre for Digital Music (C4DM)
Electronic Engineering Department
Queen Mary, University of London
[log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 7986
Fax: +44 (0)20 7882 7997

C4DM Web-site : http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/index.html