I finally had time to sort through all the photos we took on our trip to India, and have picked out the best. As always, there’s a link on (on the right) to the Photo’s section, send me an email if you don’t have the password.
Here’s a sneak peak:
Category Archives: All
Bronkhorst
A few weeks ago Hiske, her parents, and I went on a bicycle ride through the super-tiny, super-old, and super-cute village of Bronkhorst and the surrounding fields. I don’t have many pics of the town (thankfully wikipedia does), but Richard did get a few pics of the cycling and ferry ride.
Click for bigger photos.
Later we went on to Zutphen and everyone indulged me by letting me pick the restaurant (a brewery, of course). Yummy!
Update: I completely forgot that I had bought some beer from that tiny town. What a good way to finish off this post 
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Old family letter translation
Around the time of a recent family reunion in Oklahoma, my father came across a letter written to my great-grandparents just after WWII. The letter was in German, and so my father copied it and mailed it to me to see if someone here could translate it. Hiske learned some German in school and could produce a rough translation, which proved to be pretty interesting. So last week I went over to a German friend’s house to have a native speaker translate it (thanks Nick!).
Below is his translation [items in brackets are our comments]:
Mister
John Swart
Rocky, Oklahoma
U.S.A.Sender: Aljet Sandersfeld Firrel
Postoffice Bagband Kreis Leer
British zone
Province of Hannover
German [sic]Lovely Family Swart!
With great joy and a thankful heart we have received your thoughtful and valuable package. You wouldn’t believe how glad we were about all of the good things, especially about the shoes and the coat, because we don’t have a lot of warm clothing for the winter. We can really use the things you sent us, very well.
Since we have the new currency, it’s now possible to buy things here. There’s no need to even bother asking for fabric and shoes because they are so expensive here, and one just has too little money. Shoes that cost 8 marks back then, now cost up to 60 marks. Potatoes and rye, which have to be imported, cost the same as back then, it just doesn’t make sense.
But as I said it has become a little better. Before the new currency we couldn’t buy anything for money. We could only get what was on the food vouchers. We’re fine. Hopefully there will be no war. That would be horrible. We’re war-tired.
We often wonder how it’s going with Meenke, Leena, and Gesche? In the beginning, your dear mother often wrote about the older kids. Our oldest son is also called Meenke. He was a prisoner of war in the US for three years, in many places.
We are really short on bicycle tires. He thought maybe you could send us a few. We always carry our milk with the bikes to [Some Village] and we don’t have our land near [that village]. You can’t buy any here. So right after the new currency came they had some, but we didn’t have any money yet. And now they don’t have any anymore.
Please be now thanked from my heart 1,000 times for your kindness and your efforts. The Lord will reward you. The US is surely making big sacrifices for Germany. Many clothing donations came to Germany for refugees and some of those we got for our girls. Regrettably, for the men there is not really much of use.
Greetings from my heart and again many thanks from all of us here,
Your uncle and family.
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Istanbul
Hiske and I popped over to Istanbul for New Years. I uploaded a few pictures to the gallery.
Spice Bazaar
Aya Sofia
As usual, if you need the login/password, just send me an email.
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Lisbon photos are up!
Back from a short vacation to Portugal, and I uploaded the pictures to my photo gallery here. As usual you’ll need to login to view them (just send me an email).
We had a wonderful time, the sun and relaxation really recharged Hiske and I, and now we’re back to work. I had my two (potentially last) interviews the day after I returned, and so now I’m writing, writing, writing. We also returned to a slightly emptier (but roomier!) house, as Jay has moved on to France for his year-long study abroad.
Here’s a few teaser-photos:
Mirador Santa Luzia
Sintra - Pena Palace
Lisbon - Wantering around Alfalma
Transcription Tips
It may be too late for some of my fellow CRG-program buddies (some of which are much further along with their theses than I), but I figured that my process for transcribing interviews could be useful for someone else out there.
High-Quality Digital Recorder
I had no audio-recorder of any kind before I began this process, so I started doing a bit of research on the Internet and by talking with colleagues. Everyone told me not to skimp on the quality of the recorder, since you don’t know what kind of control you’ll have over your interview environment and some recorders are better at dealing with ambient noises than others.
I went ahead an purchased a Sony ICDUX70 Digital Voice Recorder for $60.00 online, and was very happy with it. It records directly to mp3, holds 12+ hours on the highest quality setting, and has a USB port for downloading with no special software required (works great on my Mac).
I’ve had two interviews in noisy areas, one was at a bar with not-so-quiet music and not-so-quiet guests, and was impressed by how audible the interviews came out.
Take Lots of Notes
Hey, you’re recording this with your fancy new digital recorder, so no use in taking copious notes, right? Wrong. Whenever your interviewee references a new name (organization or individual), acronym, or jargon, write it down. At the end of their response (or the end of the interview if you don’t want to break the flow), go over those names/terms and make sure you’ve got them right. Humans are agreeable creatures, and sometimes I find myself thinking that I’ve understood a term or reference, only to find out that I’m not 100% sure during the transcription process. This step saves a lot of time and prevents you from having to write a potentially embarrassing follow up email.
Voice Recognition Software
Here’s where I got a bit creative. Speech-recognition software has come a long way since my last encounter with it back in 2000, but it still can’t accurately understand a voice that it hasn’t been trained to recognize. So, if you’re hoping that you can just run your recorded interview through a computer and receive a relatively accurate transcript, you may have to wait another decade. 
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be pretty useful, though. I already had a copy of MacSpeech Dictate (equivilent of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows), and I invested about 30 minutes of training-time before the software could do a pretty good job at understanding what I was saying. This kind of software isn’t cheap ($99-199), and it works better with some voices than others (for example, accented speakers). I really would recommend playing around with a demo or an internet copy to see if this will work for you in the long run, before investing in something which may not be that useful for your specific situation.
Here’s my process:
- Spend some time training your voice software (and yourself) until you get to a point where it can understand a good deal of a practice text.
- Copy mp3 interviews onto your computer.
- Fire up an mp3 player capable of adjusting the play rate without changing the pitch (QuickTime will do), and set it to half speed playback.
- Plug in your headphones and make sure you can clearly hear your recording.
- Start your voice software.
- Playback your interview and speak out-loud what you hear through your headphones. This takes a bit of practice but at half-speed playback it’s not too big of a challenge. Don’t worry too much about errors, your job is to get as many of the words as possible into a text-editor.
- Close your voice software, and go back and format the messy document you’ve made as best you can.
- Now play back your interview again (possibly at normal speed), and edit your transcript as you normally would, pausing after each sentence and rewinding during difficult moments.
This process is far from perfect, but I’ve found that listen-and-repeat method can usually get a good chunk of the data into text format which I can then edit. Editing an incomplete transcript, of course, is always easier than doing the whole thing from scratch. I’ve been able to use this method to get transcribing down to a 4:1 or sometimes 3:1 ratio of transcription-time to interview time, which isn’t too bad.