Learning2gether with Claude Almansi and Lucia Bartolotti about Amara

Meeting description: http://learning2gether.pbworks.com/w/page/32206114/volunteersneeded then click "Sun July 14 14:00 GMT - Claude Almansi and Lucia Bartolotti on Amara.org"

[Vance Stevens] Posting posting

Ah, here we are: we're there.

With - this is learning 2gether, another episode of learning together,

and this is the 14th of July.

Happy independence day to any French we have listening.

And of course the could be listening, if not live, on the stream.

Well, they're not in the hangout, probably but we --

let's see, we also, we have recordings.

So you might be listening on the recording.

So this is July 14, 2013.

We're going to have a discussion today about Amara, amara.org,

which is a little captioning, or what do you call them?,

a - little tag at the bottom: transcribes the lyrics for you,

or you transcribe the lyrics and it helps you make lyrics to media.

So we're going to find out what kind of media you can use and possibly some alternatives

that might -- that some of us have been playing with it.

I was playing with it earlier today and I found it really easy to use.

And so, it's just an interesting tool I--

we got interested in it because Claude and Lucia - and I think that's Lucia I recognized a little ago:

Hi Lucia. She's just joined us. Your name just came up.

She did a lot of work transcribing our last MOOC session that we had.

And so we've got recording of that, MP3 recordings, YouTube recordings and also now, this transcription,

which has been a little bit cleaned up through crowdsourcing.

So, welcome everybody. Maybe we can go round and have people introduce themselves

and say who's here.

Test your mike.

[Nina Liakos] So, being to your right, I will --
[Vance] There you are

[Nina]--introduce myself: my name is Nina Liakos.

I'm experimenting with my lower third and unable to move my flag from right to left.

[Vance] No, it's just right: you're looking out to it
[Nina] Oh, I'm looking at [inaudible]

[Vance] We're looking into it.

[Nina] OK then, all right
[Vance] Yeah, yeah.

[Nina] Does it say were I work?

I tried to put that.
[Vance] Maryland English Institute...

[Nina] Yeah! It worked! And what's a preset?

[Vance] A preset? I don't know.

[Nina] It's telling me "Please enter a name for your preset first." Anyway: no matter.

[Benjamin Stewart] You can now [check]

Sorry: I was going to answer the question.

The preset is just a way that you can actually set your lower third.

So, you might have several lower thirds, depending on the type of interaction and community

that you are participating in.

And so, it's just a way to say this.

[Nina] All right, thank you.

So, yes, in addition to working there, I am also a WebHead

and this year I'm the lead coordinator for the Electronic Village Online

and trying to spread the word.

The Call for Proposals is out and we'd love to have some of you guys put in proposals

or participate, or both.

And I'm outside Washington DC.
[Vance] EVO sessions --

[Vance] evosessions.pbworks.com [check]

[Vance] I've put the link in the text chat.
[Nina] Yes, thank you.

I'm also trying to get out of my hangout toolbars

I will mute my mike.

[Vance] Just click on the chat tool and it will put it over there [check]

Ok! So next over is Lucia I believe

I recall from the text chat that I just helped transcribe

that Lucia was having trouble getting her mike going

so you have to unmute yourself.

Have you - is your mike working, Lucia?

Maybe she doesn't....

Can you hear us?

[Claude] She said she had problems with the audio now,

[Claude] in the chat.
[Vance] Ah, ok! Let's come back to...Oh,no! There she is!

Maybe she's got it now. Lucia, Can you hear us?

Maybe... Shall we move to Diana?

And then we'll come back to Lucia.

[Diana] Hallo everyone! I'm a newbie here, and I'm very happy to be here with you.

So I'm the tutor of English from Ukraine

and, well, I'm trying when I have just some time off my job I have

well, you know, I have joined several groups and tried to learn new things

which I really loved to do.

So Life Long Learning: this is my motto.

So, I'm learning!

[Vance] Good ! Do you know Lena [check]?

[Vance] Are you calling [check] sorry?
[Diana] No

[Vance] Oh, OK, well, she is ... somebody who joins us from Ukraine every now and then.

[Diana] Ok, no, I don't know her.

[Vance] Ok! Claude? (5:05)

[Claude] I'm Claude Almansi and I started using subtitling tools, sort of 7 years ago.

And I was immediatel fascinated by the possibility for education.

I mean, subtitling is first and foremost for including deaf people,

but as soon as I saw how it worked, I thought what a good thing for education.

And I'll try to present some of the things we can do with subtitling tools in schools.

[Vance] OK. Next over is Benamin Stewart who has --

I'm going on vacation after this week, and Benjamin is stepping in next week

to try to help keep Learning 2gether moving forward,

and any volunteers who want to come forward in the next couple of weeks,

we have -- Benjamin has actually set up a Google Doc for that,

so you can enter your name there, or you can also write on the wiki.

Anyhow, that's an aside, but thank you very much, Benjamin, for doing that

and tell us about yourself.

[Benajamin] Sure, and I'll try to include that link a little bit later

for those of you who are either watching this recording, or --

for those who wish to be participating in the coming weeks, in your absence, Vance,

............ my name is Benjamin Stewart [check] (6:31)

and I'm an American, and I live in Aguascalientes, Mexico,

and I teach free service English teachers at the public university here

and I have my website here and if you want to know a little bit more,

I'll include the link here in my lower third.

So, I'm happy to be here and look forward to learning more about Amara.

[Vance] And that jo on the far end is Andreas. Andreas, nice to see you. How are you?

[Andreas Formiconi] Hello. I'm fine, thank you. Hello to everybodyy.

Thank you, Vance.

I'm here because Lucia is a student of mine in some sort of online courses I'm giving.

Claude is claiming to be a student of mine too, actually she is a powerful co-worker.

And I'm a physicist playing and hacking with education stuff since --

I don't know, some 10 years, something like that.

Now I was trying to deliver a cMOOC, connectivist MOOC, last three months,

and now I'm experimenting something different.

So that's why I'm here. Thank you, Vance.

[Vance] Yeah! What a nice MOOC it was, apparently,

And well, OK, when we get Lucia back -- it looks like she has gone after some missing devices.

But anyway, Claude, did you want to tell us a little bit about Amara?

[Claude] Yes. Amara was first called Universal Subtitles

and it's an online subtitling tool, which produces --

sorry, first one thing: I'm not going to make differences between captions and subtitles,

because they are not the same for English English people and for English American people.

So I'll say "subtitling" and then I'll say "translating" when you use already-made subtitles

to make them in another language.

So, Amara started as Universal Subtitles

and the great advantage of it, and Lucia will be able to testify to that,

is that it is extremely simple to use.

You just transcribe what you hear,

and then you synchronize it with the audio.

And then the software produces the subtitles.

And that was the basic application, back in 2010.

And then they added a lot of other things and it became a little less simple,

but it remains still the simplest way of producing subtitles for a video.

So apart from the interest for the deaf people, it's also very useful for schools,

because -- I'm from Switzerland, so take a kindergarten in Switzerland

where they speak dialect, a sort of esoteric Swiss-German dialect:

the teacher could make a video, subtitle it in German,

then other people could translate the subtitles in all sorts of languages,

and that video would have an audience with all the other teachers,

and maybe even kids of kindergarten, this way.

So, this is why I've been using Amara for a long time.

And then we can speak also of, say, alternative ways of using Amara after [inaudible: other voice overlapping] (10:24)

[off voice] It's not taking it.

[Vance] I'll see if...
[Off voice] [inaudible] ... manual

[Vance] Elaine here, OK?

It might have worked. All right, OK

She's trying to set herself up, obviously, getting some help.

That's Elaine Marshall, and also Ana Cristina Pratas has just joined us.

Is your mike working, Ana Cristina?

No [laughs], OK. Well, we can read your lips.

[Ana Cristina] I think it's working now, can you hear me?

[Vance] Yes, we can, Ana, OK.

[Ana Cristina] Good evening everybody, from Al Ain in the UA.

Thank you very much, Vance and everybody.

[Vance] OK. Claude was just telling us a little bit about Amara, that worked,

and how easy it is to use to caption videos and other media, presumably.

[Claude] Yes, I've even used it to translate text.

I made a very long video without anything in it,

then I created false subtitles from a short story by Cory Doctorow,

and then I translated between the subtitles into Italian.

That was quite fun to do, but it's not the best way of translating a text,

but it works quite well.

You can do all sorts of things with a subtitling tool,

because basically, what it does is it allows you to transcribe

and then to time if you want, but not per force, what you've transcribed.

And then you can download the subtitles either as subtitles with the time indications,

or just as a transcript

and that, Andreas did this afternoon with Lucia's translation of the last meeting about the cMOOC:

he downloaded the Italian translation and then he --

well, he actually edited it for readability, but he pasted it in his blog.

And so, that's what I like about textual subtitling versus subtitling in a video,

apart from the fact that I'm very clumsy with my hands

and if I have to burn in subtitles in a video, it takes me hours.

But it's also because if you have a separate text file that makes - that shows the subtitles in the video,

you can then do all sorts of things with the text file.

[Vance] Now, to make the text file, you have to do it yourself

or can you - suppose YouTube already has a transcription of some sort

can you use that?

[Claude - laughs] Sometimes - sometime, Vance
[Vance .... it is junk]

[Claude] Now we've done that, I remember, with another subtitler,

with a video of the US presidential campaign.

It looked as if the automatic captions were reusable.

So we stuck through it, but I mean, it was fun too,

we didn't use Amara directly, we used something called Google Translator Toolkit

which you can use from the video on YouTube when you already have subtitles.

So, we asked PBS, because it was a PBS video, to just save the automatic subtitles

as if they were really new subtitles, then ask for a translation into English of the English subtitles.

Then we corrected - because what the Toolkit does is that it gives you the original subtitles

and it gives you the automatic translation.

So of course, there you had the Toolkit translating bad English into bad English.

And then we just corrected the second part.

It was fun, but I mean, we never did it again.

I mean, it probably took us twice as much as, had we started from scratch.

But it's going to become possible.

Automatic captions are still total rubbish and you must never offer them for listening.

That doesn't make sense.

Sometimes it's very vulgar.

There was one case of an Italian video of the Deaf Institute in Italy.

At one point, a woman said "corona", which means "crown",

and the autocaption said "fanculo", which means "fuck off".

And there was no reason why "corona" should become "fanculo,"

I mean no phonetical reason.

So it's better to - I mean if you have autocaptions on a YouTube video,

it's much better to do real captions, because you'll find some appalling things in the autocaptions.

I think I have some pretty funny ones in some of Andreas' own videos, actually,

but I can't remember them offhand.

But sometimes it works. It will work, I'd say, in a couple of years' time,

this will completely change subtitling,

because it's improving really all the time, the automatic [voice] recognition.

[Vance] Just a quick word to Lucia, who is in the stream.

Maybe Lowan [check] is there too: Lowan Dahaha [check] has been popping in and out.

Right now we have 8 people in the hangout and there should be room for 10.

So its' just an announcement in case you're listening on the stream:

you should be able to get in if you act fast on this.

One time offer [laughs]

Anyway, we have two places actually, that's pretty good.

OK. Are there any questions for Claude at this point or--?

[Nina] I think I've a question [inaudible]

the work in progress yesterday.

[Nina] I joined Amara and I'm afraid
[Vance] Move your headphone down. Headphone isn't--

[Nina] Can you hear -- Shall I start again?

[Vance] That's better.
[Nina] Yeah

[Nina] I have raised it to eat my apple.

So yesterday I was looking at the video that's not a video with Vance and you all.

I couldn't manage to do anything with it.

I mean, I couldn't -- I didn't recognize the different pages

from the ......[check] text thing which is dragon pad or whatever - wherever the instructions were

I couldn't recognize the pages I was on;

when I would click on the subtitle, it looked like I should be able to edit it

but I couldn't edit it.

So I was just looking at it, but couldn't do anything.

And I'm also afraid that I jumped in and linked my YouTube account to that as

you then told me that I shouldn't do.

So I wondered if I could undo that somehow.

Anyway, so, that was my experience and I wonder if you could comment on that.

[Claude] Yes, well, unlinking your YouTube account:

you should have a link in your Amara account to do that.

If not, you go to your Google Account and there is a setting, but then I can put the link maybe--

perhaps not right now, on how to do that.

But from your Google account, you can also review all the apps you have authorized

[Claude] to do things to your account.
[Nina] OK.

[Claude] and then you can revoke the authorization.

Then you will still be landed with the link that Amara has put on your videos,

and this you'll have to delete by hand.

[Nina] What will it have put on all my videos?

[Claude] Something saying: "Help us caption this video at..."

and then there's a URL for an Amara page.

[Nina] Actually, most of my videos are private, so it wouldn't make any difference anyway.

[Claude] Ah, then you mustn't worry about that.

But many people hadn't realized that when they had a video that was unlisted,

it would get pumped to Amara with the link put and all that.

At one point -- there's a thread in the help forum

which was about asking for deletion of videos and subtitles.

And they got so swamped by requests from people who had done the syncing

but didn't mean the effect

that they just changed the conditions and said they'd only delete videos

when there was a DMCA takedown request

which I thought was a little odd for something that was meant to be open and free in its spirit.

But anyway, I mean, the trick is, if you've done that

and then you find yourself with Amara pages for videos you don't want Amara pages for,

you first of all unsync the two things,

so you're not going to get the Amara subtitles fed automatically, without any possible control,

to your YouTube videos.

And then, well, if you then want to have the subtitles,

you can start them on the Amara page

and then YOU decide when you want to add them to YOUR videos,

as Andreas has done with several of the videos that we subtitled in the L--

how do you pronounce that? -- well, in the cMOOC.

And we made the subtitles and he fished them from the Amara page and he added them to his video.

And unless you have thousands of videos, like, say, TED conferences,

it really doesn't make sense to [inaudible: have subtitles fed automatically to your videos]

it's easy to download a subtitle file and then add it to your YouTube video.

I mean, there at least you've got control.

The syncing to YouTube thing might be a good idea if they gave you this control about what's happening

but they don't.

And sometimes you get vandals. You know Gangnam Style?

[Claude] You know the Gangnam Style video by PSY?
[Nina, Vance] Yes.

[Claude] Yeah, well, just before Xmas, someone vandalized the Spanish subtitles of that on Amara

really vulgarly. I mean, I'm no prude, but that was really very vulgar.

And that stopped there because there was no direct connection to the YouTube video,

but otherwise, had PSY done that, had he synced his videos,

extremely vulgar subtitles would have gone directly on his YouTube video --

with almost, back then a milliard, now - sorry: a billion - now certainly a billion views.

I mean, it's really inciting vandalism, this sync,

as it is set up.

So if you can help me try to convince Amara to give people moderating control about

what is getting back to their YouTube videos, I'd be very grateful, because there are too --

[Nina] Yeah, it makes me not actually - it makes me kind of reluctant to participate in this.

It seems like we shouldn't be able to -- to change people's videos on YouTube.

I mean, maybe you can make a new one with subtitles,

but you shouldn't be able to change it irretrievably.

[Claude] Exactly. That's really one of the issues: it's an issue --

and also there is an issue, vice versa,

of people not knowing that their subtitles are going directly to YouTube.

Of course, people can download them and add them.

But then, if you find your subtitles this way,

you can go to the person and say: "Hey, please say I've done the subtitles" or something.

There's a communication.

But if the person has synced accounts,there's no [garbled audio] (23:07)

... I didn't even know you had stuff and subtitles and things, the subtitles just arrived.

But - sorry: I think this is a very important issue and I've been very sanguine about it on the help forum,

but I think maybe it's better if we perhaps [inaudible]

You mentioned [inaudible] Nina?

[Nina] Yes. I'm sorry, you're kind of alternately freezing and I didn't get the question.

[Claude] No - you had a problem with editing subtitles.

[Nina] I wasn't able to edit anything.

[Claude] The one you...
[Nina] ... I was in the right place.

[Claude] On the subtitle page, did you see the Edit link, on top right?

[Vance] Yeah, there's a tab. It's an Edit tab.

[Nina] I think I did. Let me go back and look at what I was looking at.

[Vance] That lets you in, and then I think I didn't understand, there are three choices,

one is cancel, discard and something else

and I pressed something else, and it said "Are you just playing around? If so, please discard."

[Vance] So that was just a...

[Claude] Oh, you went through to the new editor, if you got that kind of message.

[Vance] Oh? OK. Well, anyway, it was quite simple.

[people talking together]

[Benjamin] Yeah, I had a problem - oh, go ahead, Nina, sorry.

[Nina] This is - that link is where I was and

let's see, I'm trying to - because I clicked on English to view subtitles

[Claude] and on top of the English page, you should have seen Edit - Edit subtitles.

[Claude] Now, the link you gave is to the main page
[Nina] I'm trying to click on it

and it's not doing anything.

OK, here it goes.

All right. So, what I see at the top is: Subtitles Comments Revisions, and then

higher than that, it's Subtitle videos Watch Volunteer Pro Services Help.

[Claude] No no no, sorry.
[Nina] Oh, I see it: Edit Subtitles

I see it, I see it. OK.

And "Somebody else is currently editing, so please wait and try again later."

OK, yeah, I think I didn't - didn't see that tab. It was kind of grayed out.

[Claude] Yes. [inaudible: I didn't know] that link to Stacy Weston's tutorial PDF

which is actually much clearer because it's much better set up than

[inaudible: the thing that we wrote in the piratepad]

And if you want to try again, I'll try to get that link again.

Oops - it (check)

No, I can't.

[Nina] Is it just happening to Claude's sound or is it everybody's sound that is sometimes...

[Vance] Claude's sound. Yes, it's kind of, it's just getting a little tinny,

it's obviously a bandwidth issue.

But anyway, don't worry about it: it's only happening sometimes.

So, carry on.

[Nina] When that happens, I can't get anything.

[Vance] Hm hm.

[Vance] So Benjamin, you had a comment?

[Benjamin] Yeah, a question actually.

I understand that there is an automatic pause function or option.

And yesterday I spent a few minutes trying to edit video, a YouTube video, to add some subtitles,

and I was able to add the video and - but I started off trying to use the automatic pause -

I don't remember exactly how it's labeled - function and I couldn't get that to work,

so then I went to using just the Tab and the Shift Tab to play the video 4 seconds,

or repeat the video, and that worked very well.

So I was able to very quickly add subtitles using the Tab function.

But I wasn't able to use the automatic function,

so that was one of the two problems that I had yesterday.

How is the automatic pause function supposed to work or --

and should this work on all browsers?

[Claude] I must say I tried the automatic function, what, 5 times, just hated it and never use it.

I use, like you, the tab pause stopping and then restarting the video.

And the 4-second one, the one for beginners, is quite good too,

except that at times, 4 seconds end in the middle of a sentence.

I used the advanced from the start [check]. I think that's the easiest one,

even if they say that the automatic pause one is the best one.

But I really dislike the automatic, because if you have a language issue, it won't stop when you want, etc.

So I just skipped that one, I've never used that.

I mean, except for trying at the very beginning.

[Benjamin] I'm sorry, and how does the advanced function work? -- or feature?

Exactly like the 4-second one, except that you don't have the 4-second pause:

you only use your Tab to stop and restart, and you use Shift Tab to rewind.

And the rewind, sometimes they say it's 4 seconds, sometimes they say it's 8 seconds

and sometimes, in fact, it's more than 8 seconds, actually.

But it doesn't really matter. I mean that's, say, that's the weak point of the traditional editor.

It's rewinding: it rewinds too much. Other editors have just 1-second rewind, which is much more sensible.

But this changes with the new editor.

In the new editor, the command is back and forward to the next and former subtitle.

And that's very sensible.

That's the same thing you actually have -- in YouTube, you even have a subtitle editor

and it works like that, and it's the same thing as well in other subtitling tools,

where you can move from subtitle to subtitle.

The most, the finest navigation tool, I think, is in DotSUB. I'll write that here. That's--

[Benjamin] If I could ask you a second part to another problem I was having

I was able to advance to next, well phase I guess: there are kind of 3 or 4 steps that are involved.

I was able to to the syncing stage but I was not able to get the syncing to work at all.

I couldn't figure it out [check], just in the few minutes I was trying to play around with it,

it looks like you -- you play the video and there is a red kind of vertical line that progresses,

that you choose where you want to insert the subtitle.

And I couldn't get that -- either couldn't get it to work or couldn't figure it out.

Is that -- I guess it's working properly -- I'm assuming I just did something wrong.

But could you explain a little bit how that works?

[Claude] Yes, again, I'm going to speak about the editor that comes up normally,

not the one you get to if you say you want to try the beta new editor,

because the beta new editor is another kettle of fish. So let's stick to the main one.

Yes. What you do when you want to sync, synchronize your transcript,

you use that [Tab] key to stop and start the video.

So when you get at the end of a subtitle, you stop the video and then,

you click on the buttons that are indicated on the right to mark the end of the subtitle.

Is that clear?

[Benjamin] Err, yeah. I'll have to try, to experiment with this.

It's kind of hard to see.

[Claude] Yes. I have linked again Lucy Weston's tutorial, which is extremely good.

And then DotSUB.com shouldn't be below that: that's another message I've added.

But the "How to create captions using Amara" .pdf is really extremely good.

And she's got great screen captures as well,

and it is more up to date than Amara's own documentation.

[Benjamin] I don't suppose you have the link to--
[Claude] I've put it

[Benjamin] a link to maybe a demonstration where it takes the viewer

through the whole process of adding subtitles?

[inaudible]

[Claude] Yes in - I'd have to find the piratepad again, but in the piratepad thing,

yes, I have the links also to the subtitled versions of the tutorials that do appear

as you are using the tool.

Didn't you see the video first?

You know, before you started writing, didn't you see the video?

It should have shown you a video.

But anyway, as this is not always appearing, I've got that in the piratepad somewhere.

I'll get the URL of the piratepad.

[Nina] Yes, I just saw it and it's there.

[Vance] I'm chatting with Lucia - let's see, there is the piratepad up here somewhere.

I can't recognize its -- anyway we'll find it in a moment.

But I'm chatting with Lucia and asked her.

She said that when I subtitled, she got an e-mail with my revisions.

So I asked her if you can revert Amara back to previous versions.

She says yes, you can recover any version on Amara,

so I suppose that's one answer to vandalism.

And she also said that Benjamin was asking about automatic pause and she has typed:

"When you're listening you st -- and suddenly you start typing without touching the tab key:

the audio stops automatically."

So I don't know: it was an answer to one of your questions, Benjamin.

Is that satisfactory?

[Vance(?)] -- as I can't remember the question it was an answer to.

[Claude] It was about automatic mode in transcribing.

OK, then, if Lucia can do that, that's good. It's just that I find it very difficult to use.

But I mean, you can try it: Lucia's description seems very convincing.

[Nina] So I have another question:

I like to use songs on YouTube and that's really great when I find songs with--

where the subtitles are already done. But sometimes they're -- wrong.

Or sometimes they're bad English or sometimes they have no capitalization or punctuation.

So, with Amara, can I edit those subtitles?

which, for me, God knows how?

Or would I have to start again?

[Claude] It depends what kind of subtitles they are.

If they are textual subtitles, yes.

If you add the video to Amara, then the YouTube existing subtitles will be added to the Amara page

and then you can edit them.

[inaudible, repeated:] If they are burned in the video, then you have to recopy the thing,

and then resync it and all that.

But there is a team on Amara, which is called Music Captioning, where we have actually lots of songs

and what we do usually is that we find a YouTube video which doesn't have captions,

then we find the captions somewhere else,

because there are lots of songs

that already have their captions somewhere else,
[note: I meant written lyrics, not captions; same in next ST]

and then we use the existing captions just by copy-pasting or by uploading them as transcript

and then we correct that and we sync that.

And there is -- I don't know if any of you know Richard Gresswell?

He teaches English in Bulgaria and he has a marvelous site

- I think I mentioned it somewhere in the pad -

with songs with subtitles and then under there, also activities

that can be done with the songs and subtitles.

And he uses Amara subtitling for that.

And he is a member of the Music Captioning team.

[Ana Cristina] I have a question, if I may.
[Claude] Sure.

[Ana Cristina] Claude, initially you talked about some lexical gaps that sometimes happen

and you gave the example of Spanish and Italian.

I work in the Middle East and the script is different.

I also teach online occasionally to Nepal, where the script is different again.

Does Amara translate scripts which are non Roman scripts?

[Claude] Yes. Amara uses what is called UTF-8 encoding.

So if a script has a UTF-8 encoding, it works.

So if you have -- you have for example three kinds of Chinese subtitles.

And I don't know Chinese, so I don't know if the scripts also vary,

but it's according to how literary or how [inaudible] the language is.

You can have Japanese, you have Thai, you now have Urdu, which took a long time, you have Hindi.

And yes: I'm not sure about Nepalese, I could --

What you can do is check that by trying to translate some existing subtitles

and you'll have all the languages.

[Ana Cristina] Great: including Arabic? Everybody (check} including Arabic?

[Claude] Yes.
[Ana Cristina] Wow, great.

[Claude] Yes, yes: Arabic, certainly.
[Ana Cristina] Thank you. [Claude] My pleasure.

[Vance] I mentioned I've been playing with a tool called Instreamia

and actually this is my experience of captioning

and I'm trying to...

because that's what I know I'm trying to put together

the similarities between the two and

Instreamia isn't open source.

It produces opensource artefacts but it doesn't

it's not something you can just [check]

I [check] because I partecipated in a LCMOOC

in which they told us everybody was on an

Instreamia accounts for a year.

But anyway, I've been playing with it

and Instreamia does a lot of things

it has a [check] just beyond captioning

but the captioning is the one I have been using most

and I'm finding that sometimes I try to get a transcription

of you tube videos and pull them in

and, of course, you have to do...

sometimes it does a lot of work for you

and sometimes not much work at all.

But it's quite [check]

It's much better od course if you can do

what you just suggested in, say

use a music video, where you can go to lyrics

a lyric site and get the lyrics there,

then use those

syncronize the lyrics

but, anyhow... I'm just.... it's...

So I know how that works

you find...

it works only with youtube videos

so the video has to be on youtube

but it...

the youtube itself isn't altering

It plays in the Instreamia interface

and captions come up

below the video and like Amara you can edit

those captions and you can change the syncronization

also it does some [check] on them

and allow and does some grammar, grammatical exercise

some vocabulary work, and things like

that [check]

[Claude] Oh, and that's free!

[Vance] Yeah, it's kind of [check] in that respect, but of course

I [check] use that much, I...

It's very interesting if you

can go actually to Instreamia.com and you can

explore some of the things, videos that the people put there

because, in theory, that is open source

or better, it's open ...artefacts... open educational resources, let's put it that way,

not open source, but they're open educational

resources that anyyone can go and play with it.

It's a lot of fun to go and find, say ,a Latin-Spanish

video that has a really exuberant singer and

you really want to understand that

and you can get translations and you can get

those as you're listening

and it becomes a game to where

you want to find a word

a missing word from a choice of structures

[voices overlap]

[Claude] What I hadn't to [check] this [check]

Instreamia will also prompt - I dont't

know what the technical word is - automatic captions from Youtube?

[Vance] Ah, well no! It uses whatever is in Youtube

you know, Youtube apparently tries to caption everything.

There usually is a transcript, sometimes there is

sometimes there isn't, but transcripts that you find there is usually

garbage, so, you know...

[Claude] Will it be possible to transcript because Amara doesn't do that

[Vance] Yes, it will! That's a nice thing about Instreamia

It actually uses your transcript. When it downloads the video

into Instreamia it downloads the transcript as well

and syncronizes it, so that's work done for you

[Claude] [inaudible] Sorry, even the automatic

transcript made by Youtube gets pulled to Instreamia?

[Vance] That's it. Whatever is there.

Whatever is there

[Claude] That's a difference with Amara.

With Amara you have to cheat a little bit

if you want automatic

you have to pretend that it's s not automatic

and save it as it were normal

and then Amara will pump it

but normally Amara only pumps humanly subtitles from Youtube

[Vance] mmm, Yeah and sometimes

[Claude] I also, yeah, sorry.

[Vance] Oh well, sometimes subtitles will be closed caption

and sometimes will use it different systems to [check]

put some work into it and set up captions.

[check] of different kinds.

Sometimes you [check] attempt to...

you put a transcript over a recording

and sometimes it's fairly accurate,

so that's very useful if you get one like that

and you just make a few changes

[voices overlap]

[Ana Cristina] I've just one question for Vance, sorry, it's very quickly

Have you done these captions with gap-fills for students

or have you got the students to create

the gap-fills for the video?

[Vance] Well, that's done automatically

I can...I'll put a link in the..., I can put a link here

when I get a moment and

when you [check] you go to..

the students go to my site [check] my

Instreamia account and then they have yo create

an account, which is very simple

[Ana Cristina] mmm

[Vance] you just [check] the email address and password

and then you can see anything that's there in Instreamia

So I guess you need to make an account but [check]

an email address and a password and a username.

But then you get the whole field,

but I can give the link to mine, so you can see what's done

but it basically does

it makes about 10 or 15 different exercise types

automatically based on natural language processing

[check]

As a very interesting product it doesn't work all that

smoothly at the moment, but the concept is really interesting.

And I wrote an article about it

[check]

that links it in the Piratepad

[Ana Cristina] Great! Thank you, thank you!

[Claude] And, Vance, can it use also downloads of subtitles as with Amara or not?

[Vance] I don't think, no, I dont't think so

I don't know people you can copy-paste

That it sort comes one at a time

I think once it's in Amara you can use it

but there is not much you can really get out of it, so...

[Claude] But I mean in Instreamia, in Instreamia

[Vance] Ah Instreamia! I meant it in Instreamia

[Claude] also [voices overlap]

Because that's for me the really big advantage of tools like Amara

which is the one this is about, but also Dot.sub or

Subtitle-horse and I love Subtitle-horse because

it's such a good name [46:00]

The great advantages are that the subtitles can be downloaded

and reused in other contexts. For example

once I subtitled a video about missing people in Pakistan

and I did that using this stuff and then I tried to convert to the time tools

by hand [CHECK]

So I tried with several

[check] in the meantime

and most of them sort of said: 'No. it's buggy'

and one of them accepted and the [check] fixed subtitles.

So that I was able to reuse them on the [check] platforms and that I think

is really the great advantage of true

Not only Amara. Amara is nice with [check]

free and open source software.

But of all those online subtitling sites that use open standard formats for download

I... you can download subtitles as [inaudible]

but you can also use .srt which is one of the formats of .spv

And now there's a new format where you can use on Youtube - which is called web vtt

and that's really fashinating because

soon you'll be able to use that for script

and audio description - you know, the description of things for the blind people

and then browsers, in a couple of years time probably, will be able to

do the vocal synthesis of that, so,

instead of having to do their expensive process of recording and order description,

inserting that in the video etc,

blind people will be able to switch that on and off

and, if the description is too long, it would stop the video

while the description is read, and that's [check].

And I think... For me it's not so much [check] beyond the video

Yes, that's nice and that's important

but it's what you can do with the file that makes the subtitle here

that I find fashinating.

And in fact in these sort of alternative uses I indicate [check]

that, say, you could

Say you have not this hangout which [check]

to last one hour.

But sometimes you have conferences and then people don't video record

it and you have [CHECK] 3 hours

and they went back online

of course nobody is going to listen to a 3 hour-video

and just [check]and there's always you know the glitches noise and so on

So, if you really want people to be able to use that

for the first step edit it, cut it and

digestible pieces and that you could do it with a subtitle tool

because you don't have to write subtitles because it's a a subtitle tool

you could [check] from there to there cut

and so on , and then you use that and you have all your time to

[check] what you want to cut and what you want to keep

all you could have [check]

a video you haven't made yourself

but you want to do a [check] study on one hour to do.

That's very long for a student

and then, you ask them not to do the whole subtitling which

takes a lot of time, but use the tool to think

notes that sync with the video

and that would be on it.

I'm not trying to [CHECK]

What I mean is that a subtitling tool just allows you to show

text on a video at a given time and produces

a file where these indications are present

so you can use it for [check]

provided that you can access the file downloaded

and do things for it.

[Vance][check] One of the interesting things about Instreamia

is you can do things.

If you want I can show you just briefly

because I just happen to have on a screenshare

[check] plays something really quickly and

you can just sort see what it does.

Let's see! Here we go.

What have I got here? Yep! [check]

So I'll grab one of these items here

Oh, my window's just changed

I wouldn't do that

Oh, no! It did! It has cut my email [check]

Ok here we go on Instreamia. Let's begin

ok [check], Don't open anything

Ok, that's the url

I'm looking for the one with 'Space oddity': that's a nice one

This is the Canadian astronaut who [check] the space

and took the 'Space oddity' so I'll pick up this live listening exercise

and I don't know if you will hear anything

but it doesn't really matter: you know the song

"Ground control to major Tom"

so what you can see here is it starts playing

I don't know if you can hear anything

no, I [check] on mute somehow

anyway ok

anyway you can see the

you just see the

unfortunately's the intro there

but when it says "Ground control to major Tom"

then you start see gaps appear

so now it says

"Ground control to major Tom"

and then repeat that

and it jumps down to the next one

Now, when it goes to the next one

there's a gap

ok so now you get a [check] but it stops

so if, to get the song to keep playing

you have to choose on

and then it resumes and you get the next one

So, ok, I would stop that

it actually [check] here because ...ok

[Nina] That's kind of complicated

[Vance]You know, the interesting here is that

complicated is what it does

but it's not complicated what you do.

What you do is just put the

just [voices overlap] video and then, yeah,

no, you don't have to do that: it does it!

The software does it. So that actually would be something that... if Amara [check] open source

I wouldn't be surprised they've used some Amara

tools and their work.

Is it all open source?

[Claude] Yes, it is.

[Vance] Yes, ok. But...

[Claude] Yes, it is. But the thing of making the video go forward when you add something

in it, Coursera [check] also have that in their videos, except that - you know -

the video will go

will go ahead to the point point

We'll see a little yellow sign

[?] Yes

[Claude] ...on the subtitles and that's why you

have questions and [check]

in the middle of the video

[?] Right! I was wondering how they do that! It's good!

[Claude] In the same way as Instreamia, I think!

[?] Makes the video interactive

[Claude] and personally ... Sorry, I'm not breaking rules

I think that there's a time for everything.

First, I mean, you have a lecture. I didn't [check]

for digital signal processing, which is really

cheecky because I just sort of script through my

[check] school exams in Maths and they requested

high calculus [inaudible]

but, so, I [inaudible]

But, if I had

if I had to stop answering questions when I was listening to that sort of

very recognizable logic of the people who are [check]

about what you did to digital

[check]

in such a way, I have been [check] so maybe...

I think, I think it's better to have the video

you understand the video

you work on the video

you do [check] on the video

you can take notes on it

and then you have the text.

It's already done [check]

correctness of subtitles in the video,

also take notes on video.

You don't have to add a text in the middle of that!

I don't know...[check]perhaps I'm no digital [check], I'm afraid.

[Vance] Yeah, there are so many ways to do it, but it's really interesting to find

that all of these companies automated something that - you know -

you can choose from the tools and

what you're talking about to

whatever you're talking about [check] to put text in the middle

I'm not having a text in the middle or - you know -

if you can find a script that will make that easier for you to deliver

you know, that's nice but it's a bit [check] you know - that

you know - that can be very useful.

[Claude] Yeah, but I mean...

I come from Andreas CMOOC where it's really learned centred

So, if you [inaudible] already a restriction of

what learners can do with a video [inaudible] and it's better to have the students

[inaudible]

I stop that.

Scripting things.

Scripting things, scripting all the descriptions, scripting [check], scripting misheard subtitles.

That can be very funny to do.

You can suggest those activities and then the students will

find their own way on explore tools.

The potential of syncing a text with a video

I think that if you have

I mean, if they can skip the text, that's fine

[check]they can ignore it, but the [check]

they should be able to enter the editing

to download the syncs and do all sort of [check] things with the [check]

[Ana Cristina] I just want to thank you both because I think

Amara is great for the students' education if you are teaching online

where personally I think I would like - and I will hopefully use Instreamia in the

classroom. I think it's great to have the students to create their own

gap fills for a song.

I don't know in my context whether I could get them to use Amara

but definitely for online course with more adult learners

because that's.... let's say - I think - very student centred.

[Vance] And this is... put me in mind of the - you know - a lot of work that's gone in video

you [check] to do is video

but [check] of it

I'll just put a link in the etherpad text chat

to an article about [check] and then

what they were doing was recreating tools

where you could play videos and news broadcast

in German let's say and you could turn these

the subtitles, because they had closed captions

at that time you can turn those on or off if you...

you can play the video with or without the subtitles

or see the subtitles or see the translation.

So you have different choices

And sometimes I even see this in my class

when my students watch videos.

sometimes, though, choose videos with [check] subtitles

and sometimes they turn these off

and sometimes they have subtitles in English

with those [check] something in English and it has

a subtitle

Sometimes they listen, watch a [check]film in Japanese

that doesn't have the subtitle, you know, so

[Nina] That's quite [voices overlap]

[Vance] They're choosing - you know -how the modality

that they want to experience this video

and giving the choice to the students is -

as you said - it's student centred - you know

this is ...[check] from the tools

that will give students different choices

for getting at the language in the video can have...that's ...

and actually let them learn for themselves

some of the language that's there

that's really valuable

and captioning is the real key of this - you know -

which is why Amara is so important

and why this [check] is so important.

[Claude] Now, a few things I would like to mention still

On Youtube now it's possible also to have

a twitter stream appearing as a closed caption

I haven't yet really studied them,

but this is really fashinating

You have a Youtube stream video

[check] are presumably producing now

and you see appearing as

a live, a stream tool [check] about the video

and that I really find fashinating

and I want to come back to the...

to the learning [check] caption text

some of which is not closed caption text

It does produce text

but it is not a text that is available

to everyone but which is also

fashinating. It's same language captioning

and the idea started in India

Professors decided that as everybody

loved Bollywood songs

if TV started showing them with karaoke type captions,

people would learn to read without a notice [check]

not learning but keep their reading ability

That's working very well

Then there's a [check] professor who teaches English

to students with reading difficulties

And he makes them make the karaoke subtitles

and they've done that on Shakespeare

they've done that on songs

they've done that on the Bible and anything.

They did the recording from the internet

archive because you have a lot of books

that are read aloud and have a text as well

and then, I don't know

how they do it because I tried it

I go bunkers because it means such a concentration

but...you sort of tap the space bar everytime you

want the new word to appear in the karaoke caption

and really the students who have reading problems

they made the most beautiful videos

They also use a bouncing ball

and that's crazy because you have

to tap each syllable so that the ball bounces on them

and I think that's really something worth

exploring, same language subtitling

[Vance] Yeah, and also get in your students to do it

[Claude] Yeah, exactly

[Vance] I think it's so important also to work with

short items if you can... I get them - you know -

you shouldn't get long movies

they're really difficult

you know...

[Nina] one minute videos

[Vance] Yeah, those...

[voices overlap]

[Claude] because when you start within a tool

even a tool like Amara which is extremely simple

I mean, Andreas and I started on some [check] video in dot.sub

and I remember we had moments when just

we sort of just exited because just simply finger [coverance? check]

and getting the syncing done is done a little bit differently on Dot.sub

yeah, very [check]; a manually student [check]

the manual dexterity

So it's good to start with very short things

because I remember my first [check] captioning

it could have taken me sort of 10 minutes to get

20 seconds of video subtitle.

And so, yes, don't tell them to do [check]

although it's much easier on Amara than on other platrforms

because you can do that collaboratively.

As we deal it with Lucia:

she transcribed and I synced

and she... we did that as we went along.

[Vance] What we have done was the video we've

just spoken on for the itis13

[Claude] Yes, that's the one

[Vance] [inaudible] Yeah

[Claude] But also we did them into someone's else

something on a documentary about Pompei

He...a lot of titling was

from an Indonesian ad

He was interested also for theological reasons: he is a muslim

but he was interested in Pompei

as an example of god punishing men...

people, though, humanity

Anyway, we started.

I have been to Pompei, he hadn't

so I was [check] actor who did doctor Spock

in Star Trek - they [check]

Anyway I would

I would transcribe

At the end I would put the

[check]

I said: 'Look! You don't have to do that

because we don't have to do it as Amara says.

You don't have to do all the transcripts

and then captions

and then syncronize.

You can transcribe and then

you start syncronize

and then you go on transcribing: it works, too!'

And that's sort of [check] that's important

because it isn't as far as [check] discouraging

you can already see some subtitles

appear before you [check]

And that's a sort of thing that people

find on their own - I mean -

When we did the activity for

with lt13

there were two big bugs I think on Amara

while a lot of people were starting to

subtitle

They were totally unfaced

I have never known people who [check]

sort of losing it when the bug starts.

They just went along

They found alternative ways to go on working

and it is [check] to do that a few

have [check]

Right too much serious about how it works.

I think what we helped them

sort of sails through this big bug...was that

Oh well, oh!

That isn't looking as it shouldn't look!

So what can I do?

And they found [check]

Because Amara is still extremely simple

in its concepts

That's what makes me slightly...

I must try Instreamia

but I sort was [check] to

doing too many things at a time

[Vance] [voices overlap] and try to learn a language

because I just find it really compelling

what sucked me into it

was doing it in Spanish

and playing the videos and my

you know - my [check] whatever [check]

and theories

was just drawing me into it

and those guys saying in their interviews and in their

lectures that there really challenge [check] material

as though they run mooc like courses

for language learners

and they're always forgetting feed-back

from either the English teachers or

working with or their language learners

and they're just finding that

they're very challenged to keep content coming

because students [check] of that sort

So, I don't know, it is...just try

If it appeals, you know,

the idea I think it would be

to get so many tools [check]

[check] them like they are translation tools

[check] awful

[check] translating from Spanish to English

but to just understand what's going on

there are tools

that you can be challenged on

So there are so many options

because once you've got one video

synced with its transcripts

then all their tools work on it

So - you know - whatever they do

you don't have to use them

you can if you want

[Claude] I wanted just to say something

about translating.

Unfortunately, Amara has a feature

that says "Translate with Bing"

and it's probably the worst thing

you can do if you are

translating together with other people.

It's really idiotic

I mean - if a video has subtitles on Youtube

you can get, as a viewer,

you can get the automatic translation

of the existing subtitles, ok?

you just click on the CC thing

you have a list of languages

and you have Translate Beta

and you get your Google translation

of [check] subtitles

but you have asked for them as a viewer

as a publisher, as a whatever

you can't force that sort of thing onto

people as it were a translation

and what I have tried long to

convince Amara to withdraw this feature but

they find some people who want this

so, ok, we have it

but don't choose it, please.

[Vance] I'm going to have to step out

I've got some cases I should do to prepare

for my vacation

[check]

Monday

[Nina] Where are you going, Vance?

[Vance] I'm going to [check] valley with my wife and son on Sunday

and then we're going to Commodo very quickly

[check]

[Nina] Is that of dragons?

[Vance] Yeah

[Nina] Very cool!

[Vance] It isn't diving

[Nina] Have a great time!

[check] voices overlap

[Vance] I've got a lot of space in my suitcase

But anyway, it was very nice of everyone of you to come

and populate this event

Cristina, Andreas, Benjamin is here

and Claude of course

and Diana

and [check] came from Ukraine and she has been

here all the time

[check] is the wall that we see there

but he did try to come

and Nina

and myself.

That's nine of us so there was room in the chat

Lucia had to leave because of connectively

problems to hang up

but she's still there

and I even think I see a J.L. who might

even see us in the stream from the etherpad chat window

I've got to teach people how to put

your name there

anyway there are some screenshots

if you are interested you can

open a sort of screencast and see how to use that

etherpad tool

But we won't do that now

But anyway, this is a Learning Together event

from the 14th of July 2013

we've been talking with Claude and Lucia

who have been doing this work on

Amara.org and showing us

[check] open source tool

and we've been talking about the possibilities for it

and next week Benjamin is going to

bring his community

Teachers, most [check] interested in

what's TILL tell us about it

[Benjamin]Hi, it's an acronym which stands for Teachers for Interactive Language Learning

and it's just a community that I set up

and next week we'll be talking about

gamification, virtual classrooms,

basically games and language learning

so [check] is interested in partecipating

who [check] and shares experiences and ideas on the matter

and I have included link in the chat

where you can check out

the event that I created

and so ....Yeah

I'd love to have you

anyone who is interested and

partecipate in the discussion

[Nina] Same time, Benjamin?

Will it be same time as today?

[voices overlap] same time, yes

[Vance] Ok. And also, as I know [check] event

from where [check] wifi

should be an easy matter for me just to

just transcript them to the learning 2gether pbworks.com page

So that will keep track of what's going on

and there are a couple of Sundays and Mondays

that are still open if someone of you would like to

have a session, you can start a discussion

Benjamin, is probably happy to do it

[check]

[check] A Goggle doc

which I've got linked somewhere

from all our spaces.

Anyway, you can try it

if you look hard

[Nina] ok

[Vance] But there's a document where you can write the

anybody can go to and write any suggestions

for events or topics you would like to discuss.

But anyway, that's a way of keeping

this [check] going over the summer and

I'm certainly glad that Benjamin

stepped in and offer to do something there.

So if anybody else wants to grab

the ball might get [check] off backwards

pass after next week, so...

[check] what he can

[check] and everybody was listening

to the audio from this

in the podcast because I make an mp3 recording

from the Youtube video and

I post that on Learning 2gether.net.archive

which will store this

And that's how Learning 2gether works

[Claude] Thank you all

[Vance] Ok, thanks very much

[Nina] Thanks, Claude

[Cristina] Thank you very much

[Claude] And I must explore Instreamia beyond prejudices. Thank you very much

[Nina] Ciao!

[Vance] Yeah! Have a look! Ok! Bye bye!