Week 3: Transcription, Revision, and Opportunity

 

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

 

Last weeks blog post I mentioned that I was working on a transcript, and this week was no different. This week I had finished up the “rough” draft of my transcription, which is weird to say. When I thought of transcriptions before working on the one I am working on now, I did not think that they were a lengthy process to make. Sure, it was a tedious and long task, but not something too difficult. But I was wrong. While I don’t think transcribing is super difficult, it has hidden difficulties that you do not realize until you are actually writing one. For instance, knowing what punctuation to use at certain times has been a big problem for me. If someone is talking about something and mid-sentence starts talking about something else, you are supposed to use “—" to show this lapse of thought. But sometimes the interviewee is saying something somewhat relative to what they were saying before, so perhaps you could just place that different thought in between commas. This is just one problem I am having, but it is something I am looking out for while I revise my transcript.

 

The interview itself is a fantastic listen. The interviewer was Geoffrey Cravero, who works with RICHES, and the interviewee was an educator who lived in Oviedo growing up. The interviewee went to a segregated elementary school but went to a mixed high school. The interview highlighted the differences between the two experienced as well as gave a glimpse of a black man’s personal life growing up during desegregation. I think what makes this interview special is that the interviewee is a middle-aged man which is a reminder that our dark past of segregation was not very long ago. When I was growing up and learning about the civil rights movement and these different powerful black leaders, it seemed like these people were long past, and America has long moved passed its days of segregation. But this interview has reminded me that it has not been that long since society was segregated, and things used to be very different than they are now. That is the importance of the interview.

 

To close off, I was excited to join the weekly RICHES team meetings this week. There I was able to meet the rest of the team, let them know what I was working on, and hearing about their own projects. I was also given the opportunity in mid-February to go with another RICHES member and record a community event. That is something I look forward to do, actually going out and finding local history/watching local history being made seems a lot more special ever since I joined RICHES. I look forward to doing that event and will of course record my experience with that right here.