MSU to lead $3.6 million project on 'spoken word'

By Lisa Acheson
MSU News Bulletin

MSU has been chosen by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to lead a $3.6 million project that will revolutionize audiotape repositories across the United States.

The National Gallery of the Spoken Word (NGSW), made possible by a five-year program, will create a fully searchable digitized database of historical voice recordings that span the 20th century.

A collaborative project among the humanities, education, library science and engineering, NGSW will provide the first large, broad-based repository of its kind that will be easily accessible via the Internet.

The NGSW will bring digitized historical speech across the Internet into living rooms, classrooms, research laboratories, libraries and government offices across the globe. Available to all visitors free of charge, exhibits in the NGSW repository will remain on display permanently since the NGSW faces no space limitations and never needs to rotate items out of the collections.

"This project holds tremendous promise for researchers in a wide range of fields," said Mark Kornbluh, director of MATRIX: Center for the Human Arts, Letters and Social Sciences; executive director of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences OnLine; and associate professor of history at MSU.

"We are developing a targeted range of search mechanisms that will allow users of the NGSW to not only identify key words, concepts and names, but will also enable keyword, topic, speaker and language searches of the sound files themselves," Kornbluh said.

"This grant is a hallmark for MSU," said Provost Lou Anna K. Simon. "It recognizes the efforts within the College of Arts and Letter, supported by Libraries, Computing and Technology units, to be a national leader in assuring that the arts and humanities have a prominent place in the digital age."

By delivering the transformative power of language, rhetoric and speech via the Internet, the NGSW has the potential to create a worldwide virtual community.

"The American public has demonstrated repeatedly that it will engage in and learn from serious virtual and historical debates if they are made accessible to them," Kornbluh said. "Cultural tourism is booming, for example, and C-SPAN continues to have a devoted group of followers.

"This NGSW will consist of high-quality voice materials from collections from MSU, the University of Colorado, the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.

For more information about the NGSW, visit http://www.ngsw.org.