Interviewing Living History

 

During my Internship I worked on two projects. I updated the information on Modalities and filmed and edited the transcript for a TSA YouTube video series titled “Historian Presents: Did You Know.” These two projects made up most of my work during the internship.

               A modality is the word TSA uses for the types of transportation they administer, for example aviation, passenger and freight rail, and maritime ports. TSA made a poster for each modality with a summary of what it was and how TSA regulated it. My job was to update the statistics on the posters and reword any confusing explanations. Rewording the explanations was easy because they were already well written. The hardest and most time-consuming part was updating the statistics. Some were easy like the aviation modality, which had statistics from the TSA website that were updated recently. Other modalities were not as simple to update, the maritime and highway modalities were barely mentioned on the TSA website, so I had to check other government sites like the Department of Transportation (DOT) or private organizations that kept track of the statistics I needed. I am relatively certain I found the same websites that the original creator of the posters copied from because no other website bothered to write down things like how many buses or bridges there are in the U.S. For the number and length of highway tunnels I had to contact an archivist from the DOT because their website had numbers from more than five years ago. This went well, the archivist responded quickly and was polite, but it shows how scattered the information I needed was. I cited where I found my information so the next person who updates the modality at least has a starting point.

The other Project I worked on was the filming of interviews and editing their transcripts for the TSA YouTube video series: “Historian Presents: Did You Know.” I was able to be in two of the videos. My favorite is the video on the changes to the Transportation Security Officer (TSO) uniforms. TSOs are the people you see in airport security. I interviewed two former TSOs, one was the model for the current blue uniform when it was still being selected.  The interviews were around fifteen to twenty minutes each, but they were massively cut down for the seven-minute video that made it to You Tube. After filming the interviews, I was assigned to edit the raw transcripts into ones that could be posted on the TSA website. I had to remove any repeated sections and mistakes we made during filming. I also put in time stamps from the recording. This assignment was a lot more fun than updating the modalities but it was difficult to align the transcript with the audio recording because our mistakes and interruptions during filming could take up a minute of two of the recording but that would be transcribed as paragraphs or pages on the transcript. Eventually I got used to jumping between the transcript and the recording, so it became easier to edit by the second interview.