Task 3: Speech to Text
This week’s task challenged us to record an unscripted, 5-minute story into a voice to speech recorder. Using the readings from this week, which focused on writing, its history and the development of writing systems, I will also provide an analysis of the script.
During the summer of 2017 my husband the youth pastor and I were asked to be leaders on a youth ministry program the program focussed on youth leadership through Outdoor Adventure we spent a week with a few other leaders and 10 youth and Alberta a couple of the days focussed on orientation and teaching the youth how to read maps and some other survival skills and then the following five days hiking in the white coat Wilderness Area during the hike we were divided into two groups and we saw the other group occasionally along the trip but not every day each day of the hike a different youth leader would be in charge of everything when we woke up who packed up what when we got on the trail when we stopped checked in with everyone to see how I made sure we got to our destination on time the purpose for this piece of the leadership was that then they had to not only think about themselves and what they needed to accomplish but they also had to think about each and every of their people in their group to make sure everyone was keeping up was doing well was getting their job done at the end of each day we would sit together as a group and we would talk about the areas of leadership we thought the person who is leading did really well in a day and then we also talked about areas we are either felt lacked or could use some more work having that immediate reflection time I think was helpful for the leaders that hadn’t gone yet to think about the things that they may be needed to step up in but also for the leaders that did go cuz then they had areas to work on along our hike travel approximately 70 km and we went a couple thousand feet in elevation Thriller entire trip the first night we can’t not at the intent campsite cuz we didn’t make it far enough but both of our bigger stops were at two different lakes along the way the first Lake was very crystal clear and it was beautiful it was in this Valley we stay there only one night weeden Heights back along the same Trail for a little while and we hiked up into a lake called Landslide Lake and we hiked through a large area that had experience the landslide many years prior so we hiked through a lot of shale and we hiked up a very long ways to get into Landslide Lake we stayed at Landslide Lake for two nights and on our rest today that we stayed there we got to go bouldering and we hiked up and around I’m in that Lake area and it was a very beautiful cuz you’re already after Landslide Lake we hiked up on the back side of the mountain and back down are the whole unit group with all of all 10 of our kids the last day when we hiked out we were able to make it to a summit and a lot of kids ran up to the peak as soon as they got up there though the fog gate closing in the cloud closed-end they get to see much but we hiked along the ridge of the mountain and then down the I did and it was obvious in previous years and a ton of fires on the backside at with a lots of Fallen scrub brush with in New Growth slowly making it out underneath how does wild slap wildfires are very neat because it allows a lot of natural and wild flowers to grow back in that only germinate and activated with intense heat and it’s crazy how that intense heat kills and gets rid of so much and yet out of it comes this beautiful new growth the last day was one of the hardest days of hiking even though we weren’t going up in elevation but simply because of the jarring of constantly be hiking down the joy of getting to the parking lot at the very end and laying down and waiting for our vehicles to come and pick us up was such a glorious feeling to finally take off your boots and your your socks from hiking all day and put on those fresh sandals and to let yourself breathe a little bit after our hike we did go out going back to shower anything–for so we are quite the crew as we walked into a Boston Pizza ordering a lot of food for the sun very hungry I’m people this trip was not something I had ever experienced before hiking in the mountains having to be very cautious teaching kids about bear cashing the importance of packing in what you take really thinking about how heavy your pack was and what was necessary what was essential and what was not at the beginning of my pack the beating of the trip my pack weighed 40 lb cuz I had half of a tent and a lot of food by the end of the trip my pack wait a little closer to 35 lb 30 lb which that little bit of difference made a big difference when hiking some of our kids would never experienced anything like this before realized quite quickly the importance of good shoes and a strong mind as we start hiking up a very steep incline and all you can hear them say with I can’t do this I can’t do this and eventually they do make it to the top and that that feeling of reward and a feeling of pride is it have done it even if they are short a short piece in the trip they have completed that piece and they never have to do it again the strip is something that I would definitely do again and again and take my family on this trip and eventually my son on the Strip it is a lot of hard work and yet when you reach the Peaks and we reach those tops it is absolutely stunning and beautiful and the perfect the perfect in creation it’s definitely a trip I will never forget
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
The most noticeable deviation is the absence of punctuation throughout the text. As I told the story I would make noticeable pauses, take a breath or make an exclamatory statement – however, when looking back at the scribed text none of this is recorded or known to a future reader. Another thing is that as I reread the story, now scripted, there were many areas that I would have told differently if I was writing the story instead of telling it orally. Gnanadesikan, A.E. (2011) states that “writing takes words and turns them into objects, visible or tangible” (pg. 4). This can be quite limiting if the translation is defective missing meaning, or misidentifying words, ultimately changing the story and disallowing proper description or representation. Additionally, without the use of paragraphs, this story simply demonstrates my stream of thought, as I remembered this event, but disallows the thoughts to be organized in a logical or well-mannered way.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
A very noticeable error in this story is the replacement and misidentification of words. For example, a few misinterpreted words include coat, thriller, strip, slap. The translation also included a number of auxiliary words like the, would, and, that. These errors make the story hard to follow and often changed the meaning. This demonstrates the level of error involved in the movement from orality into the written language. It is interesting that even in such a great technological age we cannot rely on the direct transmission of oral to written text contrast to Gnanadesikan (2011) who says, “in recording the words we have achieved reliable transmission of information” (pg. 3).
Throughout the story, the majority of the sentence structure and tense were correctly scribed. Overall, the story was preserved, and the ability to transcribe this story allows it to outlast if it was just kept orally (Gnanadesikan, 2011 p.3).
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common mistake in the text is the addition of unneeded and the misidentification of words. The addition of repeated words, auxiliary words, and the misidentification of words change the meaning of the text and take away from the overall message. Gnanadeskin (2011) says that “no written language is simply a record of uttered sounds” (p. 10). However, I think this short text is a clear example that this is not the case. The additions and changes to word throughout the story can and do change the meaning of the text.
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
Scripting the story would have eliminated many convention errors and the misidentification of words. Additionally, the story would have followed a more logical path of telling through the organization of paragraphs and a more intentional sequencing of events. Writing the story would have reinforced the oral story by producing a more “orderly organization of thought” (Ong, video). Furthermore, writing the story allows for reflection and changes to make details stand out and become alive to the reader.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
The pre-literate, oral culture, was built on recall. There was no way to look something up past what the people around you could remember. Ong (2002) describes that “no oral culture is verbatim”. Therefore, each time the story was told it would be slightly different. The oral language is limited and often does not carry with it the “real semantic history…” for the words spoken (Ong, p.8). However, writing brings connectedness between the history and content linking it to other writing giving it a more powerful and deeper understanding.
Walter Ong goes on to talk about how new mediums reinforce old mediums; writing reinforced oral storytelling. Writing allowed for thoughts, ideas, stories to be recorded so that they would last. After writing came printing, the development of the universal alphabet – which only reinforced the medium of writing. Then more and more people began to learn how to read and understand the medium of print. “Oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality” (Ong, 2002, p.8).
Gnanadeskin compares oral storytelling to written storytelling using the game “Telephone.” In an oral culture, the idea or phrase would be passed along and would inevitably be changed by the time it reached its end. Comparatively, if that sentence began written on a piece of paper and passed along that information is concrete that “in recording the words we have achieved reliable transmission of information” (Gnanadeskin, 2011, p.3). Through the simple speech to text script above, we know that there is not always an achievement in the reliability of the transmission of information.
I really appreciated Water Ong’s statement that “oral expression can exist and mostly has existed without any writing at all, writing never without orality” (Ong, 2002, p.8). Writing has given us the ability to record and learn and develop incredible things. However, I do believe the authenticity of the oral storytelling culture is definitely lost in its translation.
Bibliography
Abe Aboud. (2014, September 08). Walter Ong – Oral Cultures and Early Writing. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvF30zFImuo&feature=emb_title
Gnanadesikan, A. E. (2011).“The First IT Revolution.” In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (Vol. 25). John Wiley & Sons (pp. 1-10).
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.4324/9780203426258