From.wav to.txt: why we still need transcripts in the digital age

Abstract

Oral historians have debated whether and how to transcribe their interviews since the 1960s. New digital tools for indexing audio and video files appear to provide a powerful and exciting alternative to transcription. Despite such challenges, however, transcription continues to serve impor tant purposes of long-term preservation, analysis and dissemination. After surveying the transcription controversy over the past half-century, I outline five arguments in favour of transcription. I argue that archiving transcripts is a political act that places our oral histories on equal footing with government generated documents in state-run archives.