Imagine if increasing government transparency wasn't a pet cause of activists but a part of college education. At the Reese News Lab in the UNC School of Media and Journalism, students have created Capitol Hound, a searchable audio index for the North Carolina General Assembly.

By challenging students to learn by doing, the Reese News Lab is enabling them to gain hands-on experience in their fields and to serve local journalists with a useful new reporting tool. Other programs ought to consider emulating the Lab's constructivist approach to learning.

From Challenge to Problem

Capitol Hound emerged from a challenge. John Clark, Executive Director of the Reese News Lab, challenged his students to find a way to increase transparency in state government. The students identified a problem: Although North Carolina's legislatures stream sessions online, only the House records sessions, which aren't transcribed or searchable. The result is that journalists struggle to discern who said what without listening to meetings live or sitting through hours of recordings, when said recordings are available.

To address that problem, students at the Reese News Lab developed a service that enables visitors to read meeting transcriptions, search by keyword, date, or legislator, or create alerts to notify them when a keyword arises in a meeting. For the 2015 legislative session alone, Capitol Hound has transcriptions for more than 360 hours of meetings. When I spoke with Clark, he estimated that service has captured more than 60 percent of all meetings and hearings with accuracy north of 85 percent—impressive stats for a student-run project less than three years old.

Transcription Process

Students began by using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcriptions. Because it allows users to crowdsource repetitive tasks, Mechanical Turk has earned favor with academics conducting one-off tasks on flexible timeframes. However, to keep pace with the volume of legislative sessions, students needed a simpler way to manage the transcription process.

Last year, they migrated to CloudFactory's SpeakerText. In an age of algorithms, SpeakerText is defiantly human, relying upon a vast workforce of scribes. The service guarantees between 95-99 percent transcription accuracy (depending upon the plan) by splitting recordings into 10-second increments, shipping them to scribes, and splicing transcriptions back together. Damian Rochman, Head of SpeakerText, explained that the company is working with many universities upgrading online education lectures to satisfy accessibility requirements. For the Reese News Lab, which needed transcripts with time stamps in a proprietary format, SpeakerText simplified project management by providing students with a single point of contact.

Next Steps

Capitol Hound currently transcribes legislative activity in both of North Carolina's chambers, the press room, and five committee rooms. That's no small feat, especially given that no such tool existed before 2013. Even so, Clark expressed hope that, with a partner in another state, they might soon reproduce the service elsewhere.

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I would like to see the Labs first expand access in North Carolina. Capitol Hound currently charges $850 for a subscription. (You read that correctly.) While a grant from C. Felix Harvey Award for Institutional Priorities has enabled them to offer local news outlets gratis access to the 2015 legislative session, I'm eager to see Capitol Hound embrace a freemium model, through which visitors might search public records for free and pay for the convenience of alerts.

A Tool and a Provocation

Pricing qualms aside, the Reese News Lab models an effective constructivist curriculum. Recruiting students from across UNC, the Lab serves as a meeting place for hands-on learning. Students are presented with practical challenges (e.g. "How can we create more transparency in N.C. Government?") and divided into groups of three or four. They must learn to work together to deal with misunderstandings and to craft viable projects. Of 15 or more ideas presented, perhaps one or two might advance to the "beta" stage. The selection process requires students to anticipate problems before they build and sustain a project that might endure for years. (Other Labs projects include Kinethics and LegalStats.)

In the case of Capitol Hound, 20 different students have contributed to the project since 2013. In this sense, Capitol House isn't just a useful tool for government transparency; it's a pedagogical provocation that could not be easily reproduced without a large, open-ended project.

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