Week 9: Revising

 Welcome to week 9 of the semester!

Truthfully, I have nothing much new to report from my previous update, as this past week has been largely unchanging for me. I essentially have two tasks at hand that I have been chipping away at slowly but surely. Midterm projects and exams have been eating up so much more of my time than I anticipated, so there hasn't been much in the way of any breakthroughs or major developments with these tasks, though I continue to work intently!

For the first task, I am completing the finishing revisions of my transcript for the interview with veteran William Smith. As said in my previous blog post, transcribing takes up so much more time than I had expected! It's included a lot of replaying and rewatching certain clips over and over to determine exactly what my subject is articulating. The main source of conflict arises from trying to copy one's exact words while also adhering to proper grammar structures -- people stray from the rules of grammar much more than they might think when speaking freely and unscripted! This doesn't make our subject any less intelligible, in fact the audio, especially when paired with the video, makes perfect, clear sense; there's really no lack of understanding as to what Mr. Smith's meaning is in his explanations. It's an interesting process to see how to make something that is understandable to the ear also understandable to the written word. 

As for my second task, I'm still working on proof-reading the interviews assigned to me by my team lead Jayden. I've, admittedly, made less progress in this area, though I wouldn't really consider the task a more challenging one. My peers and colleagues within the VHP and Public History Center are skilled in their work and put forth diligent and precise work in transcribing and describing these interviews, so there hasn't been much for me to change, edit, or otherwise "fix". I wouldn't like (and won't attempt) to simply skim over these interviews and their related documents out of sheer faith that, since they have been fine so far, the entirety of the interviews will continue to be perfect and polished work. This would be of poor work ethic and unfair to those that have put forth genuine effort in providing accessible documents for these interviews. I'm optimistic that the rest of these interviews will continue to be smooth sailing though! I hope to make much more progress in the upcoming week, as I think my workload will finally let up a little bit.