Content Overview

Prepare Your Content

This section guides you through preparing both your interview transcripts and your collection metadata for use with Oral History as Data. Follow these steps to get your content ready for upload and visualization.

What You’ll Learn

• How to clean and format interview transcripts (Transcript Preparation Overview)
• How to structure your transcript CSV files (Transcript Tutorial)
• How to create and structure your collection metadata (Collection Metadata Overview)
• How to connect transcripts, metadata, and media files (How-to: Connect Media)

Content Preparation Workflow

1. Clean your transcript text
   • Remove formatting artifacts and normalize text for web display.
   • Use the built-in text cleaner tool or a plain text editor.
   • How-to: Clean transcript text
2. Format your transcript as CSV
   • Create a spreadsheet with these columns: speaker, words, tags (optional), timestamp (optional).
   • Each row should represent a single speaker segment.
   • Save as CSV. Name the file to match the objectid in your metadata.
   • Transcript Preparation Overview
   • Step-by-step transcript tutorial
3. Create your metadata spreadsheet
   • Use the CollectionBuilder-CSV format.
   • Required fields: objectid, title, display_template (set to transcript).
   • Recommended fields: interviewer, interviewee, date, description, subject, location, object_location (for media links).
   • Each row represents one interview.
   • Collection Metadata Overview
   • Step-by-step metadata tutorial
4. Connect transcripts and media
   • Ensure transcript filenames match the objectid in your metadata.
   • Add media URLs (YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.) in the object_location field if available.
   • How-to: Connect media to transcripts
   • How-to: Convert CollectionBuilder-CSV to OHD
5. (Optional) Add coding/tags
   • Create a filters.csv file with your coding vocabulary (columns: tag, description).
   • Apply tags in the tags column of your transcript CSV for visualization and analysis.
   • How-to: Create and apply transcript tags

Why This Matters

Well-prepared content ensures:

• Searchable, interactive transcripts
• Accurate metadata for browsing and display
• Seamless integration of transcripts, metadata, and media
• Thematic coding and visualization features

For detailed examples and templates, see the examples

and the sample spreadsheets linked throughout this documentation.