MMILL Team Processing

I am part of the MMILL Oral Histories group, alongside Kait and Jordan. The primary goal of our group is to convert CD and cassette audio files into MP3 files, edit photos to a specific dimension and DPI, proofread transcripts, create search terms and a short synopsis of the story, and rename all these files into a designated naming system. Our naming system is as follows: Last Name _ First Name _ Year of Creation. We have all selected five oral histories to focus on, bringing the grand total of oral histories to 15. The work is being divided equally, and we have tried ensuring that each person has roughly the same duration of audio files to listen to. Currently, we are all focusing on ensuring all our audio files are processed into the correct file type, and that the audio files are of substantial enough quality that they can be adequately enjoyed by the visitors of the online exhibit. I will admit that while the work itself is what I expected it to be, the time in which it takes one oral history to be completed is far longer than what I anticipated. Each oral history exceeded the 45-minute duration, meaning that to effectively convert all the files appropriately, we must budget over an hour to each oral history. Primarily, our group is focusing on the DH concepts of formatting and data digitization for this project, as our mission is to convert and make the files easy to navigate, and this will eventually lead into a successful online database curation. Our next steps with involve presenting the files in the best way we can, and Rachel will take our work and prepare it for the primary presentation on their website.

If our group were to continue onto the presentation component of the database, our work would be one small piece of the overall database with a few hundred total oral histories. This is not to say that our work isn’t important, as each person’s stories that create the database are important in their own, individual way. The work we are putting in now on the overall material processing will ensure that the presentation component of the project has smooth sailing, as the work we contribute are setting these files up to be presented alongside the blurbs we are writing about them to make the database easier to search and digest. The most important component of this project has been the conversion of cassette files into MP3 files, as these stories would be omitted and lost from the database if we were unable to present the stories in a way that could be accessed from the web.


Comments

  1. Dr. MOctober 31, 2022 at 11:25 AM

    Yes, as I mentioned on another post, the cassette interviews are definitely in need of digitizing and wouldn't have made it much longer. Preservation and disseminating these voices is important work.

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