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  • BLOG HOME
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    • Author Profiles
    • Five Things You Need to Know About the Library
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Digital Collections

    Plamondon interviews of Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain now available through Aviary

    by Guest Author September 17, 2024
    written by Guest Author

    Stories of immigration and settlement, homesteading and going to school in the countryside, church life and traditional remedies, folk songs and recipes of old fashioned doughnuts – these are some of the topics covered in the interviews in the University of Alberta Archives’ (UAA) Héritage Franco-Albertain fonds. The fonds consists of 15.4 m of textual records as well as numerous audio recordings generated by the “Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain.” This fonds was acquired by the University of Alberta Archives in 2019 from the Archives Saint-Jean which was previously housed at the University of Alberta’s Campus Saint-Jean.

    Construction bee, Plamondon
    (Provincial Archives of Alberta, A14950)
    Plamondon’s 25th anniversary – agricultural demonstration (Provincial Archives of Alberta, A14955)

    The “Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain” began in 1979 in association with Les Blés d’Or, a folk dance group from St. Paul, Alberta. Dedicated to preserving Franco-Albertan culture, the Héritage Franco-Albertain Project aimed to document expressions of French Canadian culture from across the province, including songs, dances, recipes, autobiographies, histories, and photographs. Most of the interviews were recorded in the early 1980s.

    Over a hundred audio interviews were made accessible through the UAL audiovisual streaming platform as the Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain collection back in 2021. This year, we had an exciting opportunity to make 40+ additional interviews available online, many of them with detailed indexes and transcripts. Thanks to the generous support of Céleste Zurbrigg, the UAA was able to hire a student to focus on interviews conducted in Plamondon, AB and area. Céleste made this donation in honour of her parents, Lena Dubé and Albin Plamondon, who were active community members in Plamondon their entire lives. Olivia Gosselin, a third year undergraduate student in the Faculty of Education majoring in French as a Second Language, worked on the project under the supervision of Maryna Chernyavska, Digital Archivist at the UAA. She edited audio, created metadata for the Plamondon interviews, and transcribed several of them. After her project finished, the UAA continued processing the interviews and creating additional indexes and transcripts with the help of Julianna Swaby, a third year student at Faculté Saint-Jean majoring in Anthropology with a minor in Biology, and currently a summer student at the UAA.

    Modeste Ladouceur with Laura Ladouceur and Florence Ladouceur, UAA-2019-046-742.

    We used the artificial intelligence (AI) tool, Whisper, from Open AI to create transcripts of audio which then had to be heavily edited. This helped us confirm what we already knew – that code switching is still really challenging for AI. We also learned that transcribing speech interspersed with singing confuses the software tool. However, using Whisper allowed us to create indexes and/or transcripts for about half of the Plamondon interviews, which wouldn’t have been possible within the timeframe we had, if such transcripts had to be human-generated from scratch. All of these are now accessible as part of the Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain collection and as a dedicated Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain – Plamondon & District Interviews playlist.

    “Wow, this is an absolute treasure!” commented Céleste Zurbrigg after listening to the interview with her grandmother, Sylvia Dubé. She shared that another attendee at the Plamondon and District Museum open house in early July got emotional when she heard her grandmother’s voice, because her grandmother had passed away many years ago.

    We are grateful to Céleste Zurbrigg for her financial support, as well as to everyone else  who contributed to the project, especially to Lindsay Cline, a passionate audiovisual archives enthusiast and a former Archives Assistant at the UAA, and to the UAL Metadata Team, especially Luc Fagnan who greatly helped with his prior knowledge of this material, his French-language and metadata skills to make the Plamondon interviews accessible online – just in time for the announcement of the official launch of the new Plamondon and District Museum website. They have created a Digital Library section which includes a reference to the.Plamondon & District Interviews playlist on the UAL audiovisual digital curation platform Aviary.

    Many thanks to Maryna Chernyavska, Digital Archivist Special Collections + Archives for authoring this article!

    This content is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Creative Commons licence.

    September 17, 2024 0 comment
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  • Les interviews de Plamondon du Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain maintenant disponibles chez Aviary

    by Guest Author September 17, 2024
    by Guest Author September 17, 2024

    Histoires d’immigration, vie à la ferme, remèdes traditionnels, chansons folkloriques et recettes de beignets à l’ancienne, tels sont quelques-uns des sujets abordés dans les interviews des fonds Héritage Franco-Albertain des Archives de l’Université de l’Alberta (UAA). Les fonds comprennent 15,4 m de documents textuels ainsi que de nombreux enregistrements audio générés par le Projet Héritage Franco-Albertain. Les fonds ont été acquis par les Archives de l’Université de l’Alberta en 2019 auprès des…

  • University of Alberta signs Open Access publishing agreements with Elsevier and Oxford University Press

    by Guest Author April 8, 2024
    by Guest Author April 8, 2024

    The University of Alberta Library has been pursuing publisher contracts that eliminate Article Processing Charges (APCs) for U of A-affiliated authors, facilitating greater dissemination of U of A research results. We are pleased to announce that two new agreements are now in effect for 2024 and beyond via our national Library consortium, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN). Both the Oxford and Elsevier agreements are in effect for 2024-2026. The Elsevier Agreement…

  • Digitization Spotlight: Canadian Corporate Annual Reports

    by Guest Author February 12, 2024
    by Guest Author February 12, 2024

    Written by Michaela Morrow, Digitization Assistant The words “annual business report” likely don’t conjure up the most exciting visions in your head. You most likely think of rows of monetary values, line graphs of stocks, and maybe, if you’re lucky, a photo of a company’s president. However, our library’s unique Canadian Corporate Annual Reports collection shows there is more to annual reports than numbers and suits. These reports offer us a glimpse…

  • Welcome to the New Peel’s Prairie Provinces

    by Guest Author December 4, 2023
    by Guest Author December 4, 2023

    Written by Michaela Morrow, Digitization Assistant The library is happy to announce the launch of a new version of our longtime website, Peel’s Prairie Provinces. This digital collection has been updated and migrated to the Internet Archive for better access, quality, and research. What is Peel’s Prairie Provinces? Peel’s Prairie Provinces (or “Peel”) is a digital collection of materials related to Western Canada. The collection includes rare and hard-to-find primary sources such…

  • Préserver les souvenirs, un peu à la fois : L’histoire de FRED et Kryoflux !

    by Guest Author October 31, 2023
    by Guest Author October 31, 2023

    Cet article de blog a été écrit par: Maryna Chernyavska Le 2 novembre 2023, les Archives de l’Université de l’Alberta (UAA) célèbrent la Journée mondiale de la préservation numérique. Cette journée constitue une excellente occasion de parler de tout ce qui touche à la conservation numérique. À cette occasion, nous aimerions vous présenter de nouveaux “membres” de l’équipe de l’UAA – FRED et KryoFlux. Découvrez FRET et KryoFlux Le FRED (Forensic Recovery of…

  • Preserving Memories, One Bit at a Time:the FRED and KryoFlux Story!

    by Guest Author October 31, 2023
    by Guest Author October 31, 2023

    This blog post was written by: Maryna Chernyavska The University of Alberta Archives (UAA) is celebrating World Digital Preservation Day on November 2nd. Originally initiated by the Digital Preservation Coalition, it is held on the first Thursday of every November and is a great opportunity to talk about all things digital preservation. On this occasion, we would like to introduce you to new “members” of the UAA team – FRED and KryoFlux. Meet…

  • New York Times Digital + Audio App

    by Elisabet Ingibergsson June 13, 2023
    by Elisabet Ingibergsson June 13, 2023

    Digital access to the New York Times (NYT) just got an exciting new upgrade with the launch of the New York Times Audio App! New York Times Audio, gathers their full roster of audio journalism in one place, so listeners can cut through the noise and find the stories that matter to them. Listeners will find podcasts hosted by NYT reporters, dispatches from correspondents around the globe, and even cooking advice from…

  • Digitization Spotlight: Our Voice

    by Guest Author May 23, 2023
    by Guest Author May 23, 2023

    Written by Logan Thienes, Digitization Assistant and first-year Digital Humanities student The newly-digitized Our Voice collection is a complement to the digital Alberta Street News collection, which was scanned by the U of A Library in 2022 (you can read about that project here!). Both are Edmonton street newspapers, created to serve and be sold by unhoused, disabled, and unemployed people living in Edmonton. Our Voice, originally titled Spare Change from 1994-1996,…

  • Discover Archives: Getting to Know Archival Descriptions

    by Guest Author April 11, 2023
    by Guest Author April 11, 2023

    This post was written by Digital Archivist, Maryna Chernyavska In previous posts, we introduced you to the University of Alberta Archives and some of the ways you can search our holdings, and shared some tips on how to search the Discover Archives database. Today, we would like you to get to know archival descriptions and how they help you discover archival materials. You might have noticed that Discover Archives database looks and…

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