Just Talking

The Just Talking app from Michigan State University’s Sociolinguistics Lab continues the work started in the MI Diaries app, and expands it out for a wider audience, opening the door for usage by classes, research projects, and community projects - anything where capturing audio from participants has been a tedious exercise in the past.

Thanks to utilizing CILogon as the service for signing in, you can use your existing logins with most universities or schools, or regular services like Microsoft or Github. Once signed in, you can now create profiles in multiple projects at once, and have the profiles synced between devices to make it easier to record for the same project on multiple devices.

Once a professor/teacher/researcher has requested a project with the app, users receive an application code to create new profiles - allowing classes to better track group assignments or capture recordings by semesters/sessions, researchers to run multiple groups at the same time, and community projects to target specific events (e.g. art installation tours with rotating themes, historic walking tours with different sites, etc)

Audio is automatically uploaded to the project's secure server, and if no internet is available when your recording is done, no problem - recordings are stored locally along with any selected pictures, and can be uploaded later once you have internet again.