Members of the MARMIA team recently received a tour of the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Joyce J. Scott: Walk a Mile in My Dream exhibition.

Audiovisual records are notoriously difficult to search. They take time to digitize, watch, and describe. In 2022, we received an ATHA Rocket Grant which helped us create speech-to-text transcripts for our digitized videos. Far from perfect, these transcripts are a step towards making the content in our collections more discoverable through our Aviary platform. The transcripts have fueled many keyword searches including a reference request from the Baltimore Museum of Art earlier this year. The BMA was looking for footage about Baltimore artist, Joyce J. Scott and her performances with Baltimore artist, Kay Lawal-Muhammad under the name, Thunder Thigh Revue. We found footage on a 1985 City Line episode that featured local talent. This and other Thunder Thigh Revue clips are on view until July 14, 2024 at the BMA. It is an honor to have footage from our archive screened and surrounded by Joyce J. Scott’s art.

If you’d like to volunteer to edit speech-to-text transcripts from the WJZ-TV Collection, please contact avtech@marmia.org to learn more. 

July 1, 2022: ATHA Rocket Grant Fuels WJZ-TV Searches
April 8, 2022: MARMIA Receives an Anacostia Trails Heritage Area (ATHA) Rocket Grant

This blog post was written by Joana Stillwell, MARMIA’s AV Archivist. 

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