Intro: OHMA is pleased to the announce the 2019 Travel Grant Recipient, Carlin Zia (2017) who will consider questions around transcription and creativity at the 2019 Oral History Association annual meeting in Salt Lake City.

At the 2019 Oral History Association annual meeting in Salt Lake City, Carlin will participate in a roundtable discussion on “Transcription in the Digital Era” alongside colleagues from the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, the Baylor Institute for Oral History, and the contract transcription sector. The group will consider questions like: How does transcription change the way we access and view or listen to oral history interviews? How has the nature of transcripts, and their role in oral history archives, changed in the digital era, when original footage is often so readily available? Carlin will examine transcription as a creative act and explore the relation of the oral historian to creative authority, sharing examples of unconventional transcription from OHMA capstone/thesis works, across the field, and outside of it.

Carlin Zia is a recent graduate of OHMA and current Teaching Assistant with the program. Her thesis, an epic poem in an invented form, records the life story of her Chinese-born grandfather while simultaneously charting her own project of self-historicization within that inter-generational and inter-cultural context. Carlin came to OHMA from a literature background, having graduated with distinction in English from Yale College. She brought with her a love of words and narrative and writing, and diversified her languages at Columbia to include more audio/visual mediums. She has since freelanced as a film editor (for Facing Whiteness, a collaboration between Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) and the documentarian Whitney Dow, creator of the “Whiteness Project”) and videographer. Carlin plans to continue her own oral history practice in the pursuit of a PhD in Ethnic and American Studies.