Lost in Transcription

As I mentioned in my last post, I am interested in preservation, and am intrigued as to how oral histories can be best preserved. In Starr’s chapter in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, the discussion of tapes versus transcripts caught my eye. Comparing and contrasting the usefulness of tapes versus transcripts, Starr writes that transcripts are often advantageous in the eyes of researchers because they have page numbers and indexes. However, they lack one of the most important aspects of communicative language — tone — that is best conveyed via tapes. As a result, Starr makes the case that both tapes and transcripts need to be preserved, as they each act as valuable tools for researchers.

When researchers lose access to tone by relying solely on transcripts, they lose access to one of the most subtle, and sneakily useful, aspects of an interview. This is what came to mind for me when reading Halpern’s “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-Five Years,” in which he discusses how oral history can be used to document labor history, allowing workers that have been often ignored by traditional documentation methods to share their stories. By using oral history to document ‘history from below,’ historians can better understand not only labor history, but how laborers understood their experiences. Connecting this to Starr’s work, I found myself considering how important the preservation of tone is in labor histories, where workers may fear retaliation from what they say in an interview, resulting in emotions like frustration being conveyed through tone and body language —- which might be lost in a transcript. I am curious in how doing our own oral histories, we can best make workers feel at ease to share their stories, especially in the case of workers lower in the chain of command. What are the best practices for transcription to convey meaning that might be less apparent in the spoken word? How will we be able to connect our interviews with museum workers to a larger arts and culture industry?

Lastly, in consideration of how we will approach our own oral histories, I found Portelli’s discussion of the truthfulness of oral histories to be particularly compelling, especially the argument that there are no false oral sources. Since accounts of history are so frequently divided into true/false, it was interesting to think about it being impossible for a source to be false, as it serves as a testimony of a living, breathing, human experience. To the person speaking, their oral history remains true to their experience, even if it does not match up to outside accounts of an event. In relation to this course, how we might deal with that discrepancy in testimony versus recorded history, if and when it arises? Moving forward, I’m excited to witness how the interviews that we conduct might contribute to a richer historical record … even if the interviewee’s experiences do not match the current historical record!

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References

Halpern, Rick. “Oral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-FiveYears.” The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 596–610.

Portelli, Alessandro. “What Makes Oral History Different.” In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, State University of New York Press, 1991, 45–58.

Starr, Louis. “Oral History.” Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, Altamira Press, 1996, 39–61.