Reconstruction of Apollo Mission Control Center Activity

Some cultural heritage institutions have large and growing spoken word collections, the items of which often live in isolation from each other and from other parts of those collections. This paper describes the design process for construction and evaluation of a system to automatically construct links between spoken conversations that address different aspects of the same event. We see this as one step, among many, towards building richer interconnections between part of the same collection, and between collections. Our development environment is a collection of several thousand hours of recordings made in the Mission Control Center during the Apollo space missions of the 1960’s and 1970’s.