Synchrotext: A Tool for Curating and Publishing Media Content

Peter Seitel, Smithsonian Institution, USA
http://smithsonian.tv/synchrotext/

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 2

Smithsonian Folkways' software Synchrotext is an annotated-media producer/player that synchronizes digital audio and video with scrolling transcriptions, translations and multimedia commentaries in ways that educate and entertain. It provides an automated platform to promote in-depth understanding of English and foreign language performances, storytelling, oral epics, theatrical plays, popular songs, political speeches, films, and scholarly lectures. With Synchrotext, a curator creates and publishes compiled multimedia "works" grouped in "libraries" to the Internet, to CD- or DVD-ROM, or to museum kiosks. The application also enables the viewers to create their own commentaries on the recorded performances and then save them to be viewed again and/or exchanged with colleagues. Synchrotext provides an important tool for communicating, explicating, and contextualizing recorded human utterances — simple and complex, individual and collaborative, in monologue and dialogue. Synchrotext's capabilities and its simple, intuitive interface make it the richest and deepest multimedia presentation/educational tool available. This demonstration will showcase current player features, describe subsequent features presently under development, discuss the tool's uses, and demonstrate Synchrotext Publisher's process for generating quality annotated media presentations.