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How Timestamps Improve the Overall Quality Your Oral History Transcripts
There are a couple of factors that go into improving oral history transcript quality. Besides language, typing skills, speed, use of online research tools, time stamping as a digital transcription tool, adds value to transcripts. Wikipedia defines timestamps as a sequence of characters denoting the date/time which a certain event occurred. Timestamps is the time…
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Do Oral Historians Need an IRB Approval?
In 1974, the National Research Act, set the Institutional Review Board, also known as the IRB, with the purpose of reviewing biomedical and behavioral research involving human subjects. It basically was put in place to protect human subjects. It gave the IRB the authority to approve, disapprove or require modification of projects involving human subjects.…
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What Are Some Great Oral History Reads?
Oral history is a fascinating genre that captures the voices and experiences of people who lived through historical events or everyday life. Oral history books can offer insights, perspectives, and emotions that are often missing from traditional sources. If you are interested in oral history and want to learn more about the oral history field,…
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How to Transcribe an Oral History Interview
If you haven’t already checked out my previous blog on what is oral history, kindly have a look at it. Just to recap, in the blog, we defined it as the collection of historical data from individuals who either lived through a moment in time or have crucial information regarding the moment. It is therefore…
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Transcription For Beginners
Having been a transcriber for over 6 years (yeah, that long). I get a lot of questions, from family, friends, friends of friends, about what I do followed by requests to teach what I do. Sadly, sometimes I don’t have the time to completely break down what it is I do – Too busy transcribing…
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Zoom H1n Review For your Oral History Interviews
There are a number of recorders that can be used to record your oral history interviews and choosing the best voice recorders will depend on a lot of factors. Zoom H1 has been the choice of many oral historians due to its small size and simplicity, but the evolution continued. Zoom has since then introduced…
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Oral History Technology: Top Three Tips on Picking a Foot Pedal.
Imagine not having to go through the tedious process of using your mouse or keyboard specific keys to play, pause, rewind, forward your oral history audio file? Instead, having to do that with a foot pedal using your foot? Sounds pretty cool right? As an oral historian ready to transcribe your audios, you probably have…
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Choosing the Best Voice Recorders for Your Oral History Interviews
When selecting a voice recorder for your oral history interviews, you don’t want this to be an everyday event. You want to do it once and kind of put it in the back of your mind and forget about it for a while. So, let’s look at what to consider when choosing a voice recorder…
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Top Tips on How to Ask Questions in An Oral History Interview
In oral history, interviews are important as they can convey personality, explain motivation, and reveal inner thoughts and perceptions. To some extent an interview may serve as the only source of information available about a certain event, person or period of time. This is why it is vital that an interviewer/oral historian be well prepared…
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Top Tips on How to Record your Oral History Interviews in a Noisy Environment
An oral history interview recorded in a noisy environment is a nightmare to anyone who has to listen back to the recordings, especially anyone given the task to transcribe the audio. It’s a fact that sometimes researchers require transcribers to perform miracles and turn poorly recorded data into immaculate transcripts. As transcribers, we would love…
