S. R. Klemmer, J. Graham, G. J. Wolff, and J. A. Landay, “Books with voices: paper transcripts as a physical interface to oral histories,” in CHI ’03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 89–96, ACM, 2003. [PDF]

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This paper describes Books with Voices, an enhacement of paper transcripts enabling random access to digital video interviews on a PDA. Historians collect a huge amount of audio interviews that later are transcribed. However, the audio recording preserves some value as the original voice of the interviewee, the intonation of the words, etc. Unfortunately, because this material is mostly undedited and difficult to find, the textual trasncripts are the preferred source of infromation. Therefore, the authors proposed a prototype that could help relate a certain textual transcript to the original audio souce.

They performed a qualitative evaluation of the prototype with 13 participants. The video helped readers clarify the text and observe non-verbal cues.

The paper contains also a thorough literature review on the subject.