The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BSI)

The Budapest Sociolinguistic Interview (BSI) project is a long-term sociolinguistic project aiming to provide solid empirical data about the varieties of Hungarian spoken in Budapest. About 250-300 hours of tape recorded data was collected in a carefully compiled sociolinguistic interview which was administered to a 250 strong representative sample of Budapest speakers. The research topics spanned phonetics/phonological to lexical questions and were investigated with the help of a battery of tasks ranging from oral sentence completion, reading at normal and fast speed to at least half an hour of guided conversations.
The tape recording of one complete interview has recently been digitized and a sample CD has been prepared which includes a common HTML graphical interface to the transcript and the sound files. The talk will give an overview of how such a huge body of heterogeneous data was processed to provide access to it through a multimedia hypertext representation.