Cleveland Voices Oral History Transcription

THE CLEVELAND REGIONAL ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION is a community treasure. It is one of the nation's largest fully digitized, publicly available collections of oral histories about a metropolitan area. Funds will support the transcription of approximately 1,100 hours of digital recorded oral history interviews. Representing the voices of Clevelanders from all walks of life, these interviews collectively tell the story of the Cleveland region. However, without transcripts these interviews are not as fully accessible as they might be.

The Case for Transcription

Transcription gives hearing-impaired users meaningful access to interview audio. It helps search engines index the content of interviews, which means more people can find and use them. Transcripts on clevelandvoices.org are interactive, so users can scan through the text and, if they see something interesting, they can click to play that section of the audio file. All in all, transcribing interviews makes them more accessible, more findable, and more useful and usable.​

Our Transcription Process

We've done our best to identify the most cost-effective strategy for audio transcription, combining the power of voice-recognition and artificial intelligence technologies with manual editing by content experts. Sponsorship dollars help us cover costs in the following areas: license/service fees for automated transcription tools; the hiring of qualified local professionals and CSU History students to manually edit and improve generated transcripts; and other costs related to keeping the collection and websites up-to-date.​

Sponsor an Interview

Supporters of this campaign may sponsor an interview using their personal, family, or business/organizational name. They may also choose to contribute anonymously or in memoriam. This sponsorship credit will become part of the archival record.

Sponsor an Entire Series

Just like sponsoring an interview, we'll add your sponsorship message and personal, family, or business/organizational name to the entire series, as well as to the individual interview records. If you are interested in sponsoring a series that is not listed, let us know and we'll add it. Send a message to digitalhumanities@csuohio.edu.

Donations to this campaign are tax-deductible as permissible by law.