Royal Marine Bill Balmer-POW

[handtohand22]

Hi all,

I have started another sponsored free book on the service life of Bill Balmer, Royal Marine.

It is at the 'raw data' stage. It has been transcribed directly from three months of (Monday night) audio tape sessions. It needs at least six months of TLC/corrections and background information to complete.

Any input/insight would be appreciated.

My Service Life

[Antipodean Andy]

H2H22

Nicely done. Are you doing the transcribing yourself? I've got quite a few hours of interviews on mini-disc and am dreading typing them up as half an hour will take more than an hour for me to get through.

[handtohand22]

Originally Posted by Andy in West Oz

H2H22

Nicely done. Are you doing the transcribing yourself? I've got quite a few hours of interviews on mini-disc and am dreading typing them up as half an hour will take more than an hour for me to get through.

Sometimes half an hour on tape takes two hours to transcribe. It all depends on how fast the person talks. It also depends on how fast you can transform the spoken word to the written word. In some cases language can only be interpreted from facial expressions and hand gestures.

Long sentences have to be broken up into smaller sentences in order for them to make sense. You also have to go back and ask the same questions again in order to make sense of what has been said the first time. On many occasions the second time around will add more detail to the origional story. Patience is a necessary virtue, as well as genuine interest.

[Antipodean Andy]

My thoughts exactly. I've gone over the same time period with one of "my" guys several times as there's often little snippets that he mentions that I haven't picked up on before. I've found handing him a book that relates to his service (Lancaster in this case) is also useful as he comments on the content/pics.