Use-a-thon: Oral History Transcriptions

[seth-shaw-unlv]

Use-a-thon lesson 1: check the issue queue (#1003) before you start digging into the issue.

This issue has the attention of the Drupal 8 community; there is an open ticket for adding WebVTT support to core (https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/3057144), but it needs work. Ideally we would contribute to these issues to get VTT support in core.

In the mean-time...

The videojs Drupal module supports adding WebVTT to a Video Media entity by adding a new Link field pointing to the WebVTT file.

This requires a site administrator to

• install the videojs module with its requirements,
• add a new Link field which will store a link to the WebVTT file.

Users would then need to:

• create a Video Media entity as a service file with the video file,
• create a File Media entity with the WebVTT file (including adding the language in the link description),
• copy the VTT file's URL (e.g. /_flysystem/2019-10/transcript.vtt) and paste it in the Video Media entity's VTT link field,
• repeat steps 2 and 3 for additional transcript files for different languages.

Benefits of this strategy:

• videos have closed captioning
• both video and transcript files are preserved in Fedora.

Drawbacks of this strategy:

• audio is not supported (the Video.js player supports audio-only but the Drupal module does not appear to),
• multiple video sources (for various video container formats) are not supported,
• manual copy/pasting of transcript URLs into another entity.

The manual copy/pasting might be mitigated with some hooks looking for new transcripts being added and pasting the transcript's URL into video media entities associated with the same node OR uploading the transcript first and creating a new Link widget that is smart enough to populate the link field.

There are other module projects on Drupal, including the ableplayer, but they don't appear to be supported or ready for production. They also require attaching files directly to the node instead of using Media entities.

Another alternative is creating our own module using strategies similar to simple paged-content to create a block that can generate the video element that pulls in the linked Service File videos and Transcript files and, eventually, create a synchronized transcript player similar to OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer).

[rosiel]

Captions are working, nah? I think this is now a documentation ticket.

[elizoller]

In short, yes.

I added documentation on how to update from islandora 1 -> 2 to get this feature https://github.com/Islandora/documentation/blob/main/docs/release_notes/8.x-2.0.md#adding-captions

But in terms of like a user doing this in the UI, no that documentation doesn't exist. I can volunteer to do that - should screenshots be taken of an isle instance or a playbook instance to demonstrate the feature?

[rosiel]

There is currently no guidance from the DIG on what screenshots should come from, so I dont think you have to worry about that. Why - are they significantly different?