Oral History


Edgar Seay Interview transcribed, ready for final audit
Photo by A. Blythe, 2018

Friday, July 6


Today, I took a break from working on the Las Colinas Women's Association colleand work on the Oral History project instead.  The Irving Archives has over 374 interviews that make up the Oral History project.  Each interview has to be audited by someone then a final audit by either the archives staff, Chris or Kevin.  Each interview that has been taped has had a copy made so that the master tape does not get damaged.  I asked Kevin if they would ever copy the master interview tapes over to CDs but Kevin didn't think that would happen anytime soon.

The interviews have been transcribed by an outside vendor that created a master document that one can go look up the name of the person and Ctrl+click on the number which will take the user to that particular interview.  Then one would select everything for that interview and create a new document just for that interview.  One has to be very careful for sometimes a person could have several interviews therefore one must look at the date that the interview was given to make sure the right one is selected.  The format to save the interview once the document is created is the interviewee's last name, then first name, tape number and date of interview, if there is no date then circa then the year.

I had begun working on Edgar Seay on Thursday therefore I continued working on transcribing his interview.  Once I finished transcribing I typed in "Audited by Alison Blythe on July 5 & 6, 2018" which lets Kevin and Chris know that that interview is ready for the final audit.  I put the interview tape back into the card catalog storage that I had mentioned in a before blog post and retrieved the next interview.  This interview had two tapes to it, which would mean that I would be working on it for a couple of days.  The next person that I was transcribing their interview was Clyde Story.  He was a very interesting person and at first I thought that it would be an easy interview to transcribe, but I was wrong.  Clyde Story during his interview had his wife nearby and she would have side conversations with the interviewer while they would interview Clyde.  Kevin had told me that sometimes depending on what was said that words could be ignored and left out of the interview like uh, um, and other filler words.  Remembering that little tidbit of wisdom, I was ignoring the side conversations until I got half way through when I discovered that the the following [ASIDE CONVERSATION] was written in.  Those words were not at the beginning, so I made a mental note about to ask Kevin.  Then at the very end of the interview the woman was mentioned during the interview but had not been throughout the entire interview.  Again, I made a mental not to ask Kevin about it the next time I came to the archives.  I did not finish Clyde Story's interview that day so I saved the document and left for the day.


Three boxes of Master interview tapes
Photo by A. Blythe, 2008
The master document of digitized oral histories
Photo by A. Blythe, 2018

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