Digital Scholarship Conversations: Piloting AI-assisted Captioning for Tufts Digital Library Collections

Digital Scholarship Conversations series is a monthly brown bag hosted by Tisch Library. Each conversation will focus on a different topic, helping us share ideas and build community around the intersection of digital technology and our research and teaching.

Tisch Library’s Digital Initiatives department has been experimenting with workflows using OpenAI’s Whisper to create captions and transcripts for audio and video materials in Tufts Digital Library. While many A/V items have commercially prepared captions, many of our older items do not, making them less accessible. We will describe our methodology and the benefits and drawbacks to using Whisper, as well as ideas for future improvements.

Bios:

Nicholas (Nick) Homenda is Head of Digital Initiatives at Tisch Library, where he manages digitization and digital repository services. He formerly worked in librarian positions at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of South Carolina. In a prior career, Nick was an orchestral clarinetist.

Hayley Curtis is the Senior Library Assistant in Digital Initiatives at Tisch Library. In addition to working on AI projects, she digitizes historical books and helps manage content in Tufts Digital Library. Before Tufts, Hayley worked in Digital Projects at the Wolbach Astronomy Library and Photographic Glass Plates Collection at Harvard College Observatory.