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Historical Voices

About Historical Voices

"Hearing the actual voices of the past can bring history alive in a way that reading a transcribed text never can, noted Mark Kornbluh, Director of MATRIX. Digital technologies now allow us to recapture the sounds of the past and make them freely available to students, teachers, and all Americans through the World Wide Web."

Historical Voices (www.historicalvoices.org) is part of the Digital Library Initiative II funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Historical Voices is one of the first fully functional, multi-media, interoperable digital libraries available online. The primary goals of each of these projects will be the development of a rich set of both online exhibits and educational curricula, utilizing audio files as a key component of these resources.

Historical Voices is working to create a federated archives and trans-institutional resources. To this end, Historical Voices is working with several partners to build collections and galaries, including the Chicago Historical Society; Northwestern University; University of Michigan, Flint; Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN), Dakar, SN; West African Research Center (WARC), Dakar, SN; University of Capetown, SA; University of the Western Cape, SA; and University of Durban, Westville, SA. Historical Voices is also working with several research partners, including Center for Speech and Language Research, University of Colorado; Northwestern University; Speech Processing Lab, Michigan State University; Speech and Audiology, Michigan Sate University; and the Oral History Association.

Historical Voices is housed at Michigan State University's MATRIX: the Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences online (matrix.msu.edu). MATRIX is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. The center engages in fundamental research in the development of digital libraries, creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies, and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies.

For more For more information contact Matrix.