TingFung, Chu

09/20/2018

For the NYPL Oral History assignment, I choose the Bob Bozic’s interview, who is the bartender has been working in Soho for almost 20 years. Throughout his interview, he talks about when the first time he got into the bar “Finalle”  at his age of 26, he mentions how the difference was Soho changes in 1980 and the present. Also, since he has been working the bar for so long, he talks about the history of his working place that he views as home. Furthermore, in the interview, he mentions he lives in Tribeca in Downtown Manhattan where he can conveniently straight heading to work by walking for him. Basically, he mostly speaks out how much he loves the work in the Soho neighborhood and he is so passionate about his work.

While I was listening to his interview, it’s not a problem for listening to the whole conversation. However, with typing the words he speaks, that will be a little bit hard for me since I am not a native English Speaker, I needed to very concentrate for what he said and typed the words really fast and some of the words that I had no idea, which is kind of messy. In addition, sometimes I heard the people voices in the background or their eating sound he made, that would be hard to catch the word he said. In the end, When the interview is finished, I rolled the transcription up to check it again, a lot of nonsense words like ” to heaven can look in”, some silly sentence I type. And, you found the script did not make any sense as you read it one by one.  To sum up, this assignment/ project is like an exercise that let me feel how to work as the typer who types the text out in the TV news program.

Anthony Sierra

9/20/18

 

NYPL Oral History Project

 

For the NYPL Oral History Assignment I had decided to transcribe the interview between Aden Seraile and William Seraile. Throughout this interview, Aden Seraile reminisces about his early days growing up in Harlem in the height of the Crack Era and watching it evolve into the neighborhood it is today. I resonate so much with this interview because I grew up in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, which was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the borough. Then over time I have witnessed Bushwick become one of the most gentrified areas in the entire country.

I truly found the assignment interesting because I had picked an interview that I can relate to so easily. Aden and William Seraile both spoke very articulately, making it easy to transcribe. One of the main concerns I had with the assignment was the tutorial, I feel like it did not offer much help, meaning that I had to figure out the process on my own. Switching between windows, constantly having to pause the audio was a nuisance, but once I had it figured out it became extremely easy. All of these audio interviews are relatable in its own way, and it’s easy to get invested into the story being told. The freedom to choose the interview we wanted made this assignment more entertaining, while remaining informative.

For the NYPL Oral History assignment I chose the Deborah Morgan interview by Clara Galvano. In this interview Deborah talks about living in Washington Heights for over 50 years in the same apartment building. During her lifetime, she has witnessed many changes to the neighborhood. What was once an area with a large Jewish population is now a melting pot, home to people from many different cultures. Deborah loves Washington Heights and cannot imagine living anywhere else. I have a lot in common with Deborah Morgan because I too have also lived in the same home and same neighborhood for my entire life. I’ve witnessed changes throughout my neighborhood. East New York is primarily an African-American, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhood.  It is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the city. But now it’s becoming different through gentrification. Now there is bike lanes, coffee shops, new stores and new faces.

I thought this project was very interesting and informative.  It enabled me to learn from different perspective and listen to the conversation and it how came together. I must admit, didn’t like editing part but I did notice the grammatical errors. The hardest part of this project was I had to keep on going back and forth with the audio and never getting it to the correct place where I left off was also pretty hard as well. Overall, I enjoyed this project it was intriguing and different.

 

For this project, I chose to transcribe an interview Danny R. Peralta conducted on Carlos Tony. The interview was mainly Danny getting Carlos to tell him about what it’s like living in the Bronx and just his life in general. I found that there was no main subject aside from that and as the audio went on I realized Danny was kind of just letting Carlos talk and didn’t ask too many questions. Overall, I found this assignment to be quite fun. I’m someone who actually likes editing papers and what not- but also get frustrated when there are so many grammatical errors. We’re all human so we all make mistakes. Half way into editing the transcription I got very angry and just completely lost it because I messed up. I got super confused at this one point because I thought Carlos was going to talk about a time when he was 18 years old because that was what the next line was saying, so I was just deleting so much and transcribing everything before that very line. It became so much that I was trying to figure out if there was just a way to add lines.  At this point, I decided to put my glasses on and I saw that the next couple of lines were sort of saying everything I had just typed out and I realized what I did. To say the least, I was pissed.

To make things easier for myself, I opened up a doc on my laptop and copied and paste everything I had previously wrote onto it, rewind the audio clip of the interview and just rewrote everything I had already done. So this assignment took a lot longer to do because when this happened I was going a bit crazy and kept getting frustrated about it so I just kind of stared at my laptop. After I just got over it, I kept doing the transcription and couldn’t stop laughing cause of the amount of times these guys said “y’know”. I’m so used to hearing people say “like” so much that I couldn’t help but laugh about it. Aside from this, I didn’t really find dong this difficult. The pace they were speaking at was pretty good and there were only two or three words that I just didn’t know what they were saying because they had mumbled it. I thought this was a really cool thing to do and I’ll definitely be checking back on it to see if any of my corrections were verified.

The transcript I chose to go over was about Lillian Doctor interviewing Christal Ellis who talks about Harlem and how it was when she was going up. Ellis is a librarian who spent the first 25 years of her life living in Harlem. I chose this because I used to live in Harlem for two years until I went back home to Long Island. I resonate with the parts where she talks about how Harlem is going through a change because I know she is referring to gentrification. It was easy to transcribe because she talked at a normal pace and articulated for the most part. The only parts that were hard were when there was a clear indication of the microphone falling and the background noises such as the air conditioner that you can hear mid-way through her speaking. When listening to the audio, you can tell how much emotion and passion she has for Harlem. From the stories she tells about her childhood, she is sharing her experiences that you can almost imagine by yourself because she explains them vividly and with emotion. Ellis also expressed how she can see the change from when she started working in the library in the early 2000’s to now. I understand what she is saying because whenever I visit Harlem nowadays, it keeps changing rapidly.    That is why I chose to do this audio because I felt like I can connect to what Ellis is saying and listening to her talk about it resonated with me. Therefore, doing this project was relatively easy for me.

The transcript and audio I chose to analyze was about Addis Williams. He was a puppeteer, with the ability to preform his act in more than 3 languages. What I honestly found so difficult about this assignment was the constant back and forth between listening and then deciding the correct suggestion to put for the transcript. I know the point was to pick the suggestion that you most closely heard, however I still found myself going back and forth on the same audio, just to make sure the suggestion I chose was closest to what I heard. What I found easy and exciting was the ability to choose a speaker. Although it seems small it became much easier for me to keep track of the conversation when the names were right there. Overall, I thought the actual content about Addis was interesting, I just felt that I became a little bored with his story after having to pause and switch over to the transcript, constantly. However, I know think that I am actually more knowledgeable about his story because I dissected it slowly. I also thought that the NYPL has a very unique concept of being able to interpret the interview individually. Therefore, it seems easier to retain the information when you, yourself, have to analyze the audio and the transcript.