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.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

Typing Transcriptions

Mid-way Through the Semester


April 7th, and we're making great strides in transcribing the audio files from our interviews. As we finish up the transcriptions we also peer-edit them--checking for accuracy, thoroughness, and proper spelling of place names. 

We're also in the process of creating content logs for our transcriptions—they are useful because they act as an index to our interview, highlighting important subjects discussed in the interview. This makes research and archiving in the future much easier, and makes the material more accessible and user-friendly. 

This coming week we will begin planning and creating our short documentaries using iMovie to edit our video footage. We want each documentary to have a theme and tell a short story. For many students this will be their first time working with iMovie, however, we are confident in their capabilities and creativeness and are really looking forward to seeing what ideas they come up with! 

Blogpost:  Fiona Mahar-Milani 

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