9/11 Oral Histories

August 14, 2005 12:30 PM

9/11 Oral Histories More than 12,000 pages of oral histories rendered in the voices of 503 firefighters, paramedics, and emergency medical technicians, were made public on Aug. 12. The New York Times has published all of them.
posted by portage (11 comments total)

Um...
posted by ericb at 12:39 PM on August 14, 2005

Pretty sad that the families of the firefighters had to sue to get these released.
posted by Kickstart70 at 12:39 PM on August 14, 2005

Wait, I thought the 9/11 families and firefighters are now considered traitors to their country for criticizing Bush?
posted by Davenhill at 12:40 PM on August 14, 2005

Sorry for the doublepost. but at least it's worth it.
posted by portage at 12:43 PM on August 14, 2005

Yeah, it's obviously a double, but I found it kind of sad that the post scrolled off the FP so quickly because I have only now just got around to listening to this stuff and it really got to me.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 1:18 PM on August 14, 2005

By the way, anyone notice the odd spelling errors in the NYT transcripts? I mean, I don't really mind the errors and they might've just run the tapes through some speech-to-text thing (do they do that?), but they seemed to manage to get some obscure stuff right, while leaving stuff like "Vescey street" in, and consistently so.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 1:20 PM on August 14, 2005

the odd spelling errors

These may have been transcribed using court stenography typing machines. These only record phonetic symbols, software can go back and try to expand some of it, or it is disambiguated by hand afterwards.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:34 PM on August 14, 2005

Ah. That makes sense, StickyCarpet.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 1:50 PM on August 14, 2005

:-((( I don't know about everyone else, but I've only just gotten over all this and now it's all over the place again. How many tears can you possibly shed before you move on and start living again?
posted by WaterSprite at 5:06 PM on August 14, 2005

You think you're over something and then you realize you're not.

My cousin's report.
posted by grey_flap at 5:07 PM on August 14, 2005

WaterSprite, I understand your pain, but I hope you're not saying we should keep this stuff under wraps. I cried reading the transcripts included in the 9/11 commission report, and I cried listening to the radio broadcasts from the nytimes archives, but sometimes, it's good to cry. I'm not being as clear as I'd like to be, I think.
posted by odinsdream at 5:19 PM on August 14, 2005