Tompkins

Working with the Recordings

Familiarize yourself with a sample recording page: go to the Search by Audio Titles page in the After the Day of Infamy archive, click on the first entry there ("Dear Mr. President" . . . January 8, 1942), and click on item #1.

• At the top of the page you'll see information on where and when the interview was conducted.

•  Below this you'll see an icon for Side A of the recording; if there is a Side B, as there is on other recordings, you will see two icons. 

• Clicking on these icons will allow you to listen to the audio recordings, provided you have Real Player installed on your computer. 

• If you need to install Real Player, consult the guidelines in the "Special Needs" document that you can find in "Course Information," and see the contact information there for the Help Desk if you have problems.

• When you click on the Real Player icons, your computer will play the audio file. 

• At the bottom of the Real Player screen, you'll see a time bar that will tell you how long the recording is and how much time has expired on the tape as you listen -- this will be helpful, even necessary, for the final assignment in the unit, when you must time interviews or parts of interviews.

• Below each of the icons you'll see links that connect you to written transcripts of the recordings.

• At the bottom of the page you'll see a list of topics under the title "Subjects."  This will give you an idea of the themes and topics discussed in the recording.

• In the final assignment, you'll be asked to select a series of clips from interviews that you'll use to construct a narrative from the collection (more on this later), so all of the information contained on the coverpage for each recording will help you accomplish that.

• It's not necessary to establish links to the recordings that you comment on in your blogs, but it would be helpful if you identified the recording ("Dear Mr. President" Bloomington, Indiana, January 8, 1942) and the item number if there is more than one item.  

• You should also copy-and-paste appropriate "soundbites" from the transcripts into your blogs (and later into your final assignment).  Here's an example:

The following quote from a  man named Mr. Boyer (Item 64, "Man-on-the-Street" interview, Bloomington, Indiana, December 10, 1941) indicates how some Americans felt the military dropped the ball and allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked: "I think our secretary of state must have been asleep if we were betrayed. Clearly, we need somebody in the Naval Intelligence Corps to kind of find out what's going on. If we didn't know what was going on prior to the attacks."