Week 10: A/V Log

  Hello, my name is Hiram Davila. I am in my second year at UCF in the History Master's program, and I am extremely excited to share some information about my internship this semester. My current research interests regard the early modern Spanish Empire, particularly the Spanish Inquisition. This blog will be acting as my journal week-by-week as I intern with the city of Orlando and Greenwood Cemetery throughout the Fall 2024 semester.

  This week, I needed to pivot away from the transcription I had been working on. After working on it for a few weeks, granted with many breaks in between, it is hard to keep going back to just doing the same task. Instead, I decided that I wanted to work on the A/V Log for the oral history instead. 

  From my experience before in RICHES, the A/V Log and Transcription were in the same document. The Greenwood cemetery template also has a similar design to RICHES template where there is space for topics and timestamps to go, but their is also another separate document for me to fill out. While I was making the presentation to teach the Service-Learning students about VHP, I learned more about how to do the A/V Log properly. 

  It is a much simpler task than to work on the transcription. For the transcript, as I have pointed out in previous weeks, there is a lot of nuances and rules that you have to follow. There is a lot of grey areas regarding what you should and shouldn't add to the transcription, and sometimes it can put a lengthy pause on actually getting some progress done. 

  The A/V Log does not have many specialized rules like that. Much of the A/V Log is filled out with simple information, such as the interviewer and interviewee's names, when it happened, over what medium did it happen and where if applicable. This is all information that I have already filled out in the transcript anyway. The more meatier part of the A/V Log is writing down the topics and timestamps down. This portion allowed me to re-listen to the whole oral history again without having to super intently listen to ever word, cough, laugh, etc. 

  I am not finished with the A/V Log just yet, but it has allowed me to see the fuller picture of what the oral history is about. While making the transcript, I am so focused on ever little sound that the larger picture of what information is trying to be gained from the interview is lost. By going through the A/V Log, I can see those bigger picture questions, how the connections relate to each other, and the broader implications of how the interview I am working on now connects with others that I have listened to that are also part of the Greenwood Cemetery project.