Interviews
Collecting memories from people is an excellent way to celebrate the experience of others. I have found it helps me learn more about why people hold certain beliefs, how they overcame hardships, and the world we live in. Interviewing other people has helped me learn more about myself, which is why I wanted to write up a guide for collecting the stories of other people.
The most obvious aspect of collecting stories is interviewing. There are a ton of resources by people much more experienced than myself on how to conduct an oral history interview. It is important to come up with a sample outline and use that as a starting point. I continue to consult the following resources to help me prepare for interviews.
I have been working on collecting a family’s oral history for the past few months. During the process I took notes with simple descriptions of what the speaker was describing or telling and a rough timestamp of when in the file the conversation took place. After collecting hours of stories, I realized that having a transcription would make things much easier to search and perhaps more useful to those interested in these particular histories. Why not get a transcription of the contents via one of the cloud offerings? Amazon offers a service called Transcribe that is available via the AWS suite of services. Since I have a small account and some credits to burn I figured why not kick the tires and see how Transcribe would perform on meandering oral history interviews. But before I jump into the how, let me describe my particular use case.