Critical Tasks

Critical Tasks

With and under the supervision of Texas After Violence Project staff, interns and volunteers may work on any of the following tasks, depending on individual skills, desires, abilities, experience, and time commitment, and the needs of the project

1) Transcription of interviews: The task of transcription is always with us. It's laborious, time-consuming, and -- especially at the beginning -- difficult. But transcription is also a great introduction to oral history and the methods we try to use. A transcriber will notice how someone tells her or his story, and the choices that an interviewer makes at any given moment. Listening carefully to the places where people speak rapidly and where they pause, what they seem eager to talk about and what makes them hesitate is wonderful preparation for interviewing. More, a transcriber is often in a better position than most to evaluate our work: are we doing what we say are doing?

2) Preparation for interviews: Help us identify and locate potential interview narrators, write to those narrators and tell them about our project and answer their questions. You can help us prepare for interviews by reading trial transcripts, appellate materials, and media reports. We also need help arranging the logistics: travel, housing, and sometimes borrowing cameras, lights, or tripods (if the equipment the project owns is being used at another interview.

3) Digital oral history: Oral history online is the future. In our office, you can help by transferring camera tapes to DVDs; processing the DVDs by adding the name of the narrator, the date, place, and copyright information; editing DVDs as narrators request; burning DVDs and sending them to the people we interview or (once the interviews are public) appropriate libraries and schools. You might help us publish materials online. Or you may want work on a "theme" movie. Certain topics come up over and over in our interviews. We may make mini-documentaries on certain themes, using only the recordings of interviews that narrators have agreed to makepublic.

4) Indexing: What good are hours and hours of oral history interviews to future researchers if they don't know what's in there, and don't know how to find what they want without listening to everything. We need people who think like scholars and librarians to help us index our interviews so that this material will be searchable and useful at the time it becomes public. For instance, the interviews should be categorized by places and dates, but we also want to indicate names of district attorneys and organizations and churches and events, and issues: effect on children of loss of a parent, mental illnesss, jury selection, race, mistrials, recanted testimony, gestures, correctional officers, and so on. Indexing is vital. We need some very smart people who can hear a story and recognize its many different levels as well as pay attention to details.

5) Historical research and writing: Each of the tragedies that we hear about happens in a particular place and time. What was going on in that community at the time of the murder? At the time of the trial? What events and currents in the community might have contributed to the events or to people's perceptions and reactions to the events? In Harris County, murders and capital murder trials are not unusual; many other counties have low homicide rates and have never sentenced a person to death. What is the role of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion and political affiliation in particular counties' responses toward violence? The stories we hear tell us a great deal; we will understand even more if we take time to study the communities in which these events take place.

6) Outreach: Around the community, you can help by bringing copies of brochures about our interviews to organizations, churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, libraries, community centers, grocery stores, sports events, and other places that people gather. Or you can help us by writing and calling cetain offices and organizations: victims services providers, prisoner advocacy groups, clergy, law enforcement, district attorneys, medical associations, social change, social justice, and other community organizations.

7) Translation: Help us translate material into and from the three most widely used languages in Texas: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese. Or, help translate interviews. Or you might help us translate our website into other languages so that people around the world can read about our work. As far as we have been able to tell thus far, the people who've shown the most interest in Texas' death penalty speak English and Spanish and also French, German, and Italian.

8) Event preparation: Help us prepare for our training sessions Listening after violence, or for other events. We guarantee that this training will provide you with incredible information and new perspectives that would be hard to find elsewhere.

9) Interviewing: In some instances, depending on experience, level of commitment, and length of time with project, and after orientation, training, and a period of apprenticeship, conduct oral history interviews

Thank you for considering working with us!