Transcribing Oral History

Teresa Bergen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351141987
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

Transcribing Oral History offers a comprehensive guide to the transcription of qualitative interviews, an often richly debated practice within oral history. Beginning with an introduction to the field and an overview of the many disciplines that conduct and transcribe interviews, the book goes on to offer practical advice to those looking to use transcription within their own projects. A helpful how-to section covers technology, style guides, ways to format transcripts and troubleshoot the many problems that can arise. In addition to the practicalities of transcription itself, the book encourages the reader to consider legal and ethical issues, and the effects of troubling audio on the transcriptionist. It explains how scholars can turn recorded interviews and transcripts into books, films and museum exhibits, enabling the reader to understand the wider concerns surrounding transcription as well as the practical uses to which it can be put.

Based upon the author's personal experience as a freelance transcriptionist and interviews with more than 30 professionals working around the world in the oral history and qualitative research fields, this is an indispensable guide for those involved in interviews and transcription at any level of an oral history project, including historians, transcriptionists, interviewers, project administrators, archivists, researchers and students.

1

ABOUT ORAL HISTORY AND TRANSCRIPTION

My earliest recollections of history consist of the dates of wars and lists of presidents I had to memorize for school tests, most of which I promptly forgot after taking the exam. This is an all-too-typical experience for students, leading them to believe that history is boring. How much richer my education would have been to hear a veteran recall a medic leaving him for dead on D-Day, making him spitting mad and even more determined to live. Or a politician telling the story of winning a state election and moving into the governor’s mansion, then finding it dilapidated and infested with bats. For most of us, stories are more memorable—and more interesting—than dates. We can empathize and identify with a person’s triumphs and losses, joy and humiliation, while dates are just numbers. Oral history puts the “story” back in history.

About Oral History

The Oral History Association (OHA), the professional organization in the United States, offers us this definition:

Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events. Oral history is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s and now using 21st-century digital technologies.¹

When the OHA mentions that oral history is the oldest type of historical inquiry, it is referring to what is often called “oral tradition.” The terms “oral history” and “oral tradition” are often used interchangeably, and they do overlap. But “oral tradition” usually refers to the preservation of history, stories, songs, folklore, and poems from one generation to another. This was especially important in societies without written language, or where many people weren’t literate. For example, oral tradition preserved Homer’s Iliad, Beowulf, African folktales and Native American origin stories so we can still know them today.

“Oral history” is usually used to describe recorded audio interviews. We know a collection is oral history rather than oral tradition if it meets the following criteria:

• Must be in interview format (Q&A).
• Must be recorded.
• Must be grounded in history.
• Narrator’s wishes are respected.
• Narrator is considered the primary author.
• Archived for long-term future use.
• Follows professional standards.

In this book I will use the term “project” to refer to any oral history endeavor. The size and scope of a project dictate how oral history work is organized. An independent scholar may have a focused research question, such as assessing the Yakima Brewing Company’s contributions to the development of craft beer in the United States. Or the topic could be very broad and involve multiple staff members, such as the Commonwealth Oral History Project, which aims to produce a resource on the oral history of the British Commonwealth since 1965. Oral history methodology can be used to document anything that people remember and wish to talk about in a recorded interview. Some projects require researchers to act quickly, targeting the oldest people who are still alive and able to tell a story, such as recording the last survivors of World War II. Other projects gather more recent history, such as the Arab Spring or the unfolding of Brexit. Not all oral history consists of high-profile topics. The methodology is used to document family history, the history of a neighborhood, or even a classroom project where students interview each other.

Projects are usually organized either as life histories or community histories, though there is plenty of overlap. A life history consists of any number of interviews documenting someone’s life, usually in chronological order. I’ve transcribed more than a dozen interviews with a single person for a historian writing a biography. Life histories can also include interviews by other people who knew that person, such as the oral history collections of US presidents housed in presidential libraries.

Another way to organize an oral history project is around a topic. For example, a project might collect interviews with many people involved in a local activity, such as ecologists working in urban communities, participants in a bus boycott or scientists who worked on the atom bomb. Oral history projects can also focus on a certain place or an event, such as a university, a town centennial anniversary, or a national park. While the narrators are sometimes famous or highly esteemed, oral history more frequently chronicles the lives of everyday people.

Oral history can often fill gaps in historical accounts. As Stephen H. Paschen explains in Catching Stories: A Practical Guide to Oral History:

Oral history provides sources beyond the traditional kinds of information found in books, articles and primary sources. It illuminates environments, perceptions, and feelings of individuals able to paint verbal pictures of all sorts of experiences such as workplace conditions, aspects of institutional living or foster care, and leisure activities.²

Oral history can challenge existing historical accounts, and bring emotions to centerstage. Sometimes interviews are cathartic and sprinkled with both tears and laughter. Often the narrators haven’t publicly told their stories before. These stories might be at odds with widely accepted ideas about the way things were, especially if they rain on the parade of somebody else’s good old days.

About Transcription

Oral history interviews are, by definition, recorded. The recording is considered the primary source and is kept in a repository (these days, usually an online repository) to preserve the historical record. But recordings are clumsy and inconvenient, so researchers are less likely to use them. People usually prefer print for research purposes, so recorded interviews are often transcribed. The transcript is one important access point.

I define transcription very simply: the process of transferring the spoken word into written form. But this seemingly simple job description requires a surprising amount of skill.

The role of a transcriptionist includes the following components:

• Careful listening. This profession requires patience, focus, and an above-average attention span to accurately capture every word.
• Good grasp of language. The transcriptionist faces constant decisions about how to represent spoken word as text, using punctuation and paragraphing to render a natural-sounding interview. The reader should feel as if he or she is hearing a real conversation when looking at the page.
• Research skills. Patience and diligence are required to track down correct spellings and facts.
• Accurate typing.
• Technology. A transcriptionist must handle multiple audio and video formats and navigate transcription software. Nowadays new recordings are usually digital, but recordings on older formats—such as reel-to-reel, audiocassette, and mini-cassettes—still need to be transcribed and usually require special attention. Proficiency in word processing, search engines, and email is also necessary.
• Subject expertise. Often this is gained on the job while transcribing a set of interviews with common language. The more interviews a transcriptionist types involving a certain place, time period, profession or activity, the easier it will be to accurately render future interviews in the same area.
• Humility. Transcription is the ultimate fly-on-the-wall experience. While the transcriptionist may feel like she gets to intimately know the narrator, the narrator is focused on the interviewer and may never know the transcriptionist exists. Try this exercise: Name one famous transcriptionist.

What Is Special about Oral History Transcription?

Accuracy is crucial for all types of transcription. Inaccurate medical transcription could compromise medical treatment. Poor legal transcription could endanger an innocent person’s freedom. The oral history transcriptionist will probably not face such life-threatening pressure. But she bears responsibility for a whole different animal: the historical record. Future generations—including those who have not yet been born—will count on the accuracy of our transcripts to provide an authoritative record of past events. This is important to remember on those days when typing seems tedious and the mind wants to wander. Transcribing oral histories is more than a secretarial job to pay the bills. It’s a gift to the future.

Transcription is widely favored in oral history practice. If a project has sufficient budget, it usually produces transcripts. Most oral historians consider the recording the primary document, and the written transcript as a research tool and preservation format. Even with this in mind, many researchers prefer the ease of working from an accurate transcript and may never listen to the recordings. Here’s why:

• Regional dialects, heavy accents or other difficult speech patterns are made accessible in the transcript.
• Proper names and spellings of difficult words are clarified.
• Electronic versions can be searched by keyword.
• Many people report better comprehension and retention via print than sound.
• At this point, paper is the most reliable preservation format.
• It’s faster and easier to scan visually than to listen to a recording.

It takes a certain type of person to transcribe well. She must be conscientious about preserving history, and take that duty seriously. She must have respect for archives, and scholars, and stacks of old paper that may or may not ever be read. She must be able to sit in a chair for a long period of time while maintaining mental focus and paying attention to detail. A successful transcriptionist requires a fluent grasp of punctuation, sentence structure and paragraphing. She must be patient and committed enough to research hard-to-find words, whether it be the correct spelling of a town in Vietnam or the name of a cancer medicine. “Transcribing involves listening carefully to each word in the interview,” Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan write. “This is intense work and can be tiring. The possibility of making mistakes or mishearing words or phrases increases as the ability to concentrate decreases.”³ Transcription looks deceptively simple, but involves more than mere typing.

Current Debates about Transcription

Despite the usefulness of transcriptions, some oral historians frown upon transcri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. About Oral History and Transcription
• 2. Getting Started
• 3. Transcription vs the Alternatives
• 4. Technology and Equipment
• 5. Transcription Step by Step
• 6. Hard Decisions
• 7. Editing and Polishing the Transcript
• 8. Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues
• 9. The Human Side of Transcription
• 10. Using Transcripts for Research
• Epilogue
• List of Interviewees
• Resources
• Index