Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public Radio Collection

FAIN: PW-259067-18

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Stephanie Sapienza (Project Director: July 2017 to January 2022)

The creation of an online research environment for up to 3,300 hours of digital audio files from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) and approximately 120,000 digitized images of the NAEB’s historical paper records.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Historical Society proposes to create Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public Radio Collection, a curated online reference resource providing integrated access to finding aids, digitized paper collections and transcribed digital audio files relating to the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), an historically-significant educational and public broadcasting collection. By coordinating the expertise of archivists, humanities researchers, and digital humanists, the creation of this new resource for humanities research will deliver enhanced access to important, often hidden, collections of archival audiovisual materials.

Associated Products

Digitizing and Reviving the Archives of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Digitizing and Reviving the Archives of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB)
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Author: Eric Hoyt
Abstract: Co-PIs Hoyt and Sapienza presented on the Unlocking the Airwaves project at the 2019 annual conference for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The panel, entitled From Radio to MOOCs: Educational Media Networks and the Scholar as Producer, was organized by Hoyt and also included related presentations from advisory board members Josh Shepperd and Alison Perlman, whose research in the history of public and educational media has dovetailed nicely with the work we’re doing on the project.
Date: 3/14/19
Primary URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/197HjE0gd156wMvoIWw552ujSfF0J37R5/view?usp=sharing
Primary URL Description: Google Drive link to Presentation exported as PDF
Conference Name: Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) 2019 Annual Conference

GitHub Repository - Unlocking the Airwaves website application (Computer Program)
Title: GitHub Repository - Unlocking the Airwaves website application
Author: Ed Summers
Abstract: This repository contains a static web application that was developed as part of the Unlocking the Airwaves project. You can find the production deployment of this website at: https://mith.umd.edu/airwaves/
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://github.com/umd-mith/airwaves
Primary URL Description: GitHub Repository (Airwaves web application)
Access Model: Open Access
Programming Language/Platform: NodeJS/Gatsby (Static Site Generation), JavaScript (client-side search)
Source Available?: Yes

GitHub Repository - WebVTT Audio/Transcript Player (Computer Program)
Title: GitHub Repository - WebVTT Audio/Transcript Player
Author: Ed Summers
Abstract: This repository contains code for a React component that lets you play an audio file while viewing its WebVTT subtitles as an interactive transcript. Webvtt-player was developed as part of the Unlocking the Airwaves project which received generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://github.com/umd-mith/webvtt-player
Primary URL Description: GitHub Repository - WebVTT Audio/Transcript Player
Access Model: Open Access
Programming Language/Platform: JavaScript/React; WebVTT
Source Available?: Yes

Radio Collections at Scale: MITH’s Unlocking the Airwaves as a model A/V digital humanities project (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Radio Collections at Scale: MITH’s Unlocking the Airwaves as a model A/V digital humanities project
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: Presentation given as part of the panel entitled “Supporting Digital Scholarship: Enabling Analysis of AV Collections at Scale” In this session, representatives from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (VTNA), University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Library of Congress LABS Division, and WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, will provide an overview of the digital humanities; they will share policies developed that support use of their institutions’ collections in digital humanities research; they will demonstrate how these collections have been exposed in ways that enable computational analysis and reuse in digital humanities initiatives; and will they present case study examples of how they’ve enabled discovery of archival collections through digital scholarship.
Date: 11/14/2019
Primary URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12n8UhIQRB0i1btgFB7li0YJUMhp47bgy/view?usp=sharing
Primary URL Description: Google Drive link to presentation slides (PowerPoint)
Conference Name: Association of Moving Image Archivists 2019 Annual Conference

The NAEB Radio Collection: Document Deep South and Missisippi Waterways (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The NAEB Radio Collection: Document Deep South and Missisippi Waterways
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: This presentation will highlight a historic radio program from the collection of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) at the University of Maryland, which was digitized as part of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and is now being developed by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison into an online resource by virtue of an NEH-funded grant entitled Unlocking the Airwaves: Revitalizing an Early Public and Educational Radio Collection. The presentation will feature a highlight from a radio series (Document: Deep South), specifically a 1954 program entitled Mississippi Manuscript, which covers the importance of waterways, including the Mississippi River, with a representative from the Army Corps of Engineers in Memphis analyzing the river's ‘Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior.’ The program also gestures towards inherent racial tensions in the U.S. southern economy, including the largely black labor force at shipyards, and how pioneers’ initial use of waterways were informed by/affected by the necessity of navigating ‘Indian hostility.’ The Unlocking the Airwaves project’s aim is to virtually reunify the NAEB’s audio programs with newly digitized paper materials held at the Wisconsin Historical Society. The emerging resource will allow researchers to discover media materials ‘in context,’ alongside accompanying textual documents. This presentation will include a brief demonstration of the application and highlight what materials are able to be displayed alongside Document: Deep South, including other materials about waterways and/or the environmental impact/history of the U.S. Southern economy.
Date: 5/19/2020
Primary URL: https://wp.nyu.edu/orphanfilm/2020/05/19/sapienza/
Primary URL Description: Virtual presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium website
Secondary URL: https://vimeo.com/419551316
Secondary URL Description: Link to video presentation on Vimeo
Conference Name: The Orphan Film Symposium 2020: Water, Climate, and Migration

Radio Collections at Scale: The Unlocking the Airwaves Project (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Radio Collections at Scale: The Unlocking the Airwaves Project
Abstract: Virtual presentation to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Archives Community Group. Details the Unlocking the Airwaves projects and highlights its use of the IIIF standard to link to and display documents hosted at the Internet Archive.
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Date: 5/12/2020
Location: College Park, MD (Virtual)
Primary URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CE-xgLNqLCTKWPqL0Esl3FC_t76sae2d/view?usp=sharing
Primary URL Description: Google Drive link to presentation slides (PDF)

Airtable for A/V Archivists Workshop Materials (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Airtable for A/V Archivists Workshop Materials
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: Airtable is an online relational database application that operates somewhere between Excel, Google Sheets, FileMaker, and OpenRefine. With a high ease of usability and very low barrier of entry, Airtable is a good solution for robust metadata management and data curation for archivists without the resources or skill sets to implement more costly or complicated full-stack solutions. A solid alternative to the many cloud-based project management software options, Airtable is also a great choice for cultural heritage organizations or regional archives operating remotely with a disbursed labor force. This online workshop will build upon the workshop “Airtable for A/V Archivists” given by Stephanie Sapienza and Ed Summers at last year’s AMIA Conference. This webinar may be useful to you if you are looking to build a new tool into your toolkit to do things like: unify your legacy data sets (from Excel, Google Sheets, MS Access, FileMaker, etc.) into one space; streamline workflows for authority control, metadata refinement and normalization; or project manage digitization, collection management, or other archival/preservation projects. Presenters will give an overview of Airtable basics such as tables, fields, and views, and show how this tool can be leveraged to manage different kinds of metadata and projects; create controlled vocabularies and authority lists; de-duplicate and normalize records; share data with others both within and outside your organization; data import and export. The workshop will also introduce more advanced features of Airtable, such as Airtable blocks, using the Airtable API to facilitate batch functions, and use of Airtable as a CMS backend for websites.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/420113456
Primary URL Description: Airtable for A/V Archivists: Demo #1 This is a demonstration created as part of the Airtable for A/V Archivists workshop presented by the Association of Moving Image Archivists on May 20 and 21, 2020: http://www.amiaonline.org/?p=531. Demonstration by panelist Stephanie Sapienza, Digital Humanities Archivist at MITH. GOAL: Import a flattened set of records about a collection of 513 ¼” reel to reel tapes, prepare it for a digitization project by splitting out descriptive metadata about intellectual content (‘Assets’) from technical metadata about physical objects (‘Instantiations’). Sample dataset located at go.umd.edu/airtable-data.
Secondary URL: https://vimeo.com/420350024
Secondary URL Description: Airtable for A/V Archivists: Demo #2 This is the second part of a two-part demonstration created as part of the Airtable for A/V Archivists workshop presented by the Association of Moving Image Archivists on May 20 and 21, 2020: amiaonline.org/?p=531. Part 1 is located here: https://vimeo.com/420113456 Demonstration by panelist Stephanie Sapienza, Digital Humanities Archivist at MITH. GOAL: Demonstrate how to combine repeating fields split across several columns into a separate, linked table, which will serve as either a controlled vocabulary or list of authorities, and can then be utilized for a variety of data curation uses. Sample dataset located at go.umd.edu/airtable-data.
Audience: General Public

Group Projects for INST742 (Implementing Digital Curation) (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Group Projects for INST742 (Implementing Digital Curation)
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: In the UMD iSchool's Spring 2020 graduate course entitled INST 742 (Implementing Digital Curation, taught by Katrina Fenlon), students were asked to work with the geographic metadata in the NAEB collections for both paper materials and radio programs behind Unlocking the Airwaves as part of a group project. Working with the GIS metadata in a cloned version of the Unlocking the Airwaves Airtable database, they streamlined and normalized the extant GIS metadata, and made recommendations on how it might be used to produce exhibits and visualizations.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rqw1YogqXNqzzmeVQ6OzF-JsKYkY_oEL96yXaMUjhp4/edit#heading=h.v7fyei9k1ru
Primary URL Description: Description of Group Work for Option #5: Unlocking the Airwaves Geographic Metadata Analysis/Recommendations
Audience: Graduate

Radio Survivor Podcast # 252 – Exploring the Seeds of Public Radio in Educational Radio Archives (Radio/Audio Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Radio Survivor Podcast # 252 – Exploring the Seeds of Public Radio in Educational Radio Archives
Director: Jennifer Waits
Director: Eric Klein
Director: Paul Riismandel
Abstract: This week, we explore the ancestor of public radio in the United States: educational radio. Our guest, Stephanie Sapienza, helps to bring educational radio archives to life through her work on the multi-institution “Unlocking the Airwaves” project. As Digital Humanities Archivist at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at University of Maryland, Sapienza is working with audio from the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB). She describes the breadth of materials in the collection and its role in public radio history and also shares more about her unique (and entertaining) presentation at the Orphan Film Symposium in which she reported on old time educational radio in an old time radio style.
Date: 6/30/2020
Primary URL: http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2020/06/30/podcast-252-exploring-the-seeds-of-public-radio-in-educational-radio-archives/
Primary URL Description: Link to the Radio Survivor Podcast Episode #252
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Radio
Format: Digital File
Format: Web

Reconciling Archival Authorities to Wikidata in OpenRefine (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Reconciling Archival Authorities to Wikidata in OpenRefine
Writer: Stephanie Sapienza
Director: Stephanie Sapienza
Producer: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: This video demonstrates how to use a dataset of archival authorities (in this case, people entities) to ‘reconcile’ (compare and match against) Wikidata, using the OpenRefine Wikdiata plugin. Once the matching is completed, data can be extracted from Wikidata using OpenRefine, and then imported back into Airtable.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/595481214
Primary URL Description: Vimeo Link
Format: Web

Enhancing Geographic Metadata Using Airtable, OpenRefine, & Wikidata (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Enhancing Geographic Metadata Using Airtable, OpenRefine, & Wikidata
Writer: Stephanie Sapienza
Director: Stephanie Sapienza
Producer: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: This video demonstrates another piece of the archival authorities workflow by showing how the Airwaves website was enhanced using geographic metadata extracted from Wikidata using OpenRefine. This work builds off of the work described in the video above.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/522483612
Primary URL Description: Vimeo Link
Format: Web

The Unlocking the Airwaves Website: A Brief Guide (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: The Unlocking the Airwaves Website: A Brief Guide
Writer: J.J. Bersch
Director: J.J. Bersch
Producer: Stephanie Sapienza
Producer: Eric Hoyt
Abstract: This short video employs complementary visuals to describe in simpler terms how the Airwaves website works. The video was designed for a less technical audience, and can be utilized in classrooms or workshops as well.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/591804413
Primary URL Description: Vimeo Link
Format: Web

Airwaves Application Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Airwaves Application Database
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: This link gives you access to a read-only version of the Airtable database which contains not only the data feeding the Airwaves website (metadata about documents, programs, and entities), but also data related to existing and enhanced SNAC and Wikidata records. This database can be cloned/forked by clicking on the ‘Copy base’ link on the upper right, which will copy the base into the Airtable account of the users clicking on it. Users must be signed into Airtable and will need to have an Airtable Pro workspace in order to use the data as-is.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://airtable.com/shr690MG0pkaxMrhU
Access Model: Open access

Healing the Gap: Digital Humanities Methods for the Virtual Reunification of Split Media and Paper Collections (Article)
Title: Healing the Gap: Digital Humanities Methods for the Virtual Reunification of Split Media and Paper Collections
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Author: Eric Hoyt
Author: Ed Summers
Author: J.J. Bersch
Author: Matthew St. John
Abstract: At the heart of this project lies a question that both Principal Investigators have long identified as being central to many ongoing conversations surrounding the role of the audiovisual in digital humanities: how can we utilize digital humanities methods to encourage the use of audiovisual collections as primary historical records, both in and outside of the academy? The project team published a lengthy piece which unpacked the many complexities of this research question - why these collections become marginalized in the first place, how their descriptive strategies present unique challenges in a number of directions, and what other challenges face digital humanists who want to use a/v collections.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/15/1/000509/000509.html
Primary URL Description: URL
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Digital Humanities Quarterly
Publisher: Digital Humanities Quarterly

On Forks and Completion: Reflections on a Five-year Digital Humanities Project (Blog Post)
Title: On Forks and Completion: Reflections on a Five-year Digital Humanities Project
Author: Stephanie Sapienza
Abstract: Blog post with personal reflections from PI Stephanie Sapienza on the eve of the final launch of the Airwaves website.
Date: 07/29/2021
Primary URL: https://mith.umd.edu/news/unlocking-the-airwaves-launch/
Primary URL Description: URL
Website: MITH Website

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