Roots with Wings, a Floyd County Place-Based Education Project:: Intergenerational Connections

Floyd Story Center

Since 1998, a community oral history collection partnership of the Old Church Gallery, Ltd., Radford University’s Center for Social and Cultural Research, Honors Program, Scholar-Citizen Initiative, Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, and Floyd County High School. Our archives now hold over 100 interviews.

In our Roots with Wings project, college mentors, high school staff, and community volunteers meet weekly during the school year to teach the discipline of oral history collection.


Students learn ethical, methodologically sound interview techniques, practice and complete several interviews, transcribe the audiotapes, create searchable content logs, archive interviewee resources and period photographs, learn the technology of audio and video recording, research historical backgrounds, acquire proficiency in iMovie and storytelling, and finally extract a theme from an hour long interview to create a seven minute movie production.

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Transcription Begins!

Listening and Typing the Audio Tracks 


Thursday, March 31st, our class meeting is all about transcribing!  We are listening to our interview’s audio track and then typing out what is said.  The program that we use for this is called Express Scribe, and after getting used to program, we upload our audio tracks, label them very specifically, and everyone becomes well on their way to transcribing interviews.  Each student is assigned, on average, 15 minutes of audio as not to feel overwhelmed and have the tracks evenly distributed.  By the end of the day, all the students had developed their own techniques for working with the program.

In the coming weeks we will introduce them to iMovie.  This begins the next process of editing our own short documentaries out of our interviews---letting creativity and informative story-telling take over on the video projects.
blogpost: Fiona Mahar-Milani
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