Automated Live Captions for Virtual and In-Person Meetings

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, we are starting to think about what life will look like with a return of in-person services, meetings, and events. Many of us are considering what lessons we want to keep from our time conducting these activities online to make the return to in-person as inclusive as possible.

Main library reading room

“Mainlibraryreadingroom.jpg.” C. E. Crane, licensed under a CC-BY 2.0 Attribution license.

One way to make your meetings and presentations accessible is the use of live, automated captions. Captions benefit those who are hard-of-hearing, those who prefer to read the captions while listening to help focus, people whose first language is not English, and others. Over the course of the last year, several online platforms have introduced or enhanced features that create live captions for both virtual and in-person meetings.

Live Captions for Virtual Meetings and Presentations

Most of the major virtual meeting platforms have implemented automated live captioning services.

Zoom

Zoom gives you the option using either live, automated captions or assigning someone to create manual captions. Zoom’s live transcriptions only support US English and can be affected by background noise, so they recommend using manual captioner to ensure you are meeting accessibility guidelines. You can also integrate a third-party captioning software if you prefer.

Microsoft Teams

MS Teams offers live captions in US English and includes some features that allow captions to be attributed to individual speakers. Their live captioning service automatically filters out profane language and is available on the mobile app.

Google Meet

Unlike Zoom and Teams, Google Meet offers live captions in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish (both Latin America and Spain). This feature is also available on the Google Meet app for Android, iPhone, and iPad.

Slack

Slack currently does not offer live automated captions during meetings.

Icon of laptop open with four people in different qudrants representing an online meeting

“Meeting” by Nawicon from the Noun Project.

Live Captions for In-Person Presentations

After our meetings and presentations return to in-person, we can still incorporate live captions whenever possible to make our meetings more accessible. This works best when a single speaker is presenting to a group.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint’s live captioning feature allows your live presentation to be automatically transcribed and displayed on your presentation slides. The captions can be displayed in either the speaker’s native language or translated into other languages. Presenters can also adjust how the captions display on the screen.

Google Slides

The captioning feature in Google slides is limited to US English and works best with a single speaker. Captions can be turned on during the presentation but do now allow for the presenter to customize their appearance.

Icon of four figures around a table in front of a blamk presentation screen

“Meeting”. by IconforYou from the Noun Project.

As we return to some degree of normalcy, we can push ourselves to imagine creative ways to take the benefits of online gathering with us into the future. The inclusive practice we have adopted don’t need to just disappear, especially as technology and our ways of working continue to adapt.

Introductions: What is GIS, anyways?

This post is part of a series where we introduce you to the various topics that we cover in the Scholarly Commons. Maybe you’re new to the field or you’re just to the point where you’re just too afraid to ask… Fear not! We are here to take it back to the basics!

So, what is GIS, anyways?

Geographic Information Systems, or GIS as it is often referred to, is a way of gathering, maintaining, and analyzing data. GIS uses geography and spatial data to create visualizations using maps. This is a very useful way to analyze your data to identify and understand trends, relationships, and patterns in your data over a geographic region. Simply put, it is a way of visualizing data geographically and the key to GIS is in spatial data. In addition to spatial data, there is attribute data which is basically any other data as it relates to the spatial data. For example, if you were looking at the University of Illinois campus, the actual location of the buildings would be spatial data, while the type of building (i.e. an academic, laboratory, recreation, etc) would be attribute data. Using these two types of data together can allow researchers to explore and answer difficult questions.

While it can get more complex than that, since this is an introductions series, we won’t go into the fine details. If you want to learn more about GIS and the projects you can do with it, you can reach out to the Scholarly Common’s GIS Specialist, Wenjie Wang.

So, who uses GIS?

Anyone can use GIS! You can use maps to visualize your data to identify problems, monitor change, set priorities, and forecast fluctuations.

There are GIS technologies and applications that assist researchers in performing GIS. The Scholarly Commons has a wide range of GIS resources, including software that you can access from your own computer and a directory of geospatial data available throughout the web and University Library resources. 

If you’re interested in learning more about GIS application and software and how to apply it to your own projects you can fill out a consultation request formattend a Savvy Researcher WorkshopLive Chat with us on Ask a Librarian, or send us an email. We are always happy to help!

 

 

References

Dempsey, C. (2019, August 16). What is GIS? GIS Lounge. https://www.gislounge.com/what-is-gis/

What is GIS? | Geographic Information System Mapping Technology. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2021, from https://www.esri.com/en-us/what-is-gis/overview

Meet our Graduate Assistants: Ben Ostermeier

What is your background education and work experience?

I graduated from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville with a Bachelor of Arts in History, with a minor in Computer Science. I was also the first SIUE student to receive an additional minor in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. In undergrad I worked on a variety of digital humanities projects with the IRIS Center for the digital humanities, and after graduating I was hired as the technician for the IRIS Center. In that role, I was responsible for supporting the technical needs of digital humanities projects affiliated with the IRIS Center and provided guidance to professors and students starting their own digital scholarship projects.

What led you to your field?

I have been drawn to applied humanities, particularly history, since high school, and I have long enjoyed tinkering with software and making information available online. When I was young this usually manifested in reading and writing information on fan wikis. More recently, I have particularly enjoyed working on digital archives that focus on local community history, such as the SIUE Madison Historical project at madison-historical.siue.edu.

What are your favorite projects you’ve worked on?

While working for the Scholarly Commons, I have had the opportunity to work with my fellow graduate assistant Mallory Untch to publish our new podcast, It Takes a Campus, on iTunes and other popular podcast libraries. Recently, I recorded and published an episode with Dr. Ted Underwood. Mallory and I also created an interactive timeline showcasing the history of the Scholarly Commons for the unit’s tenth anniversary last fall.

What are some of your favorite underutilized Scholarly Commons resources that you would recommend?

We offer consultations to patrons looking for in-depth assistance with their digital scholarship. You can request a consultation through our online form!

When you graduate, what would your ideal job position look like?

I would love to work as a Digital Archivist in some form, responsible for ensuring the long term preservation of digital artifacts, as well as the best way to make these objects accessible to users. It is especially important to me that these digital spaces relate to and are accessible to the people and cultures represented in the items, so I hope I am able to make these sorts of community connections wherever I end up working.

Data Feminism and Data Justice

“Data” can seem like an abstract term – What counts as data? Who decides what is counted? How is data created? What is it used for?

Outline of a figure surrounded by a pie chart, speach bubble, book, bar chart, and venn diagram to represent different types of data

“Data”. Olena Panasovska. Licensed under a CC BY license. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=data&i=3819883

These questions are some of the ones you might ask when applying a Data Feminist framework to you research. Data Feminism goes beyond looking at the mechanics and logistics of data collection and analysis to undercover the influences of structural power and erasure in the collection, analysis, and application of data.

Data Feminism was developed by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Kline, authors of the book Data Feminism. Their ideas are grounded in the work of Kimberle Crenshaw, the legal scholar credited with developing the concept of intersectionality. Using this lens, they seek to undercover the ways data science has caused harm to marginalized communities and the ways data justice can be used to remedy those harms in partnership with the communities we aim to help.

The Seven Principles of Data Feminism include:

  • Examine power
  • Challenge power
  • Rethink binaries and hierarchies
  • Elevate emotion and embodiment
  • Embrace pluralism
  • Consider context
  • Make labor visible

Applying data feminist principles to your research might involve working with local communities to co-create consent forms, using data collection to fill gaps in available data about marginalized groups, prioritizing the use of open source, community-created tools, and properly acknowledging and compensating people involved in all stages of the research process. At the heart of this work is the questioning of whose interests drive research and how we can reorient those interests around social justice, equity, and community.

The Feminist Data Manifest-No, authored in part by Anita Say Chan, Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and the College of Media, provides additional principles to commit to in data feminist research. These resources, and the scholars and communities engaged in this work, demonstrate how data and research can be used to advance justice, reject neutrality, and prioritize those who have historically experienced the greatest harm at the hands of researchers.

The Data + Feminism Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, directed by D’Ignazio, is a research organization that “uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place”. They are members of the Design Justice Network, which seeks to bring together people interested in research that centers marginalized people and aims to address the ways research and data are used to cause harm. These groups provide examples for how to engage in data feminist and data-justice inspired research and action.

Learning how to use tools like SPSS and NVivo is an important aspect of data-related research, but thinking about the seven principles of Data Feminism can inspire us to think critically about our work and engage more fully in our communities.  For more information about data feminism, check out these resources:

Meet Michelle Reed: New Head of The Scholarly Commons

Head shot of Michelle Reed from the chest up

It is an exciting time for our unit because we finally have a new head of the Scholarly Commons, Michelle Reed! We want to give our readers a chance to learn more about Michelle and her career in this blog post.

Before joining us, Michelle worked as Associate Librarian and Director of Open Educational Resources at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. In that role Michelle led efforts to support the adoption, modification, and creation of open educational resources (OER). She oversaw the university’s financial investment in OER, managed the OER publishing activities of Mavs Open Press, and collaborated with UTA faculty to secure external grant funding for OER development, including a $582,322 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to create a series of transportation resources.

Michelle Reed giving a presentation at a podium

Prior to joining UTA, Michelle supported both information literacy and scholarly communication at the University of Kansas Libraries. She also worked as a technical writer and editor for a Department of Energy waste management center and a small research and manufacturing business specializing in neurophysiological research tools.

In her new role as the head of the Scholarly Commons she hopes to build collaborative relationships with partners from within the library and across campus to support the use and exploration of digital tools, broaden access to scholarship, and enhance the university’s research output.

To learn more about Michelle, you can visit her website librariansreed.com.