15 August 2007
The Lost Editions
Posted by Adrian under About The Show, Meta
Anyone’s who’s had to transcribe speech will know how difficult and exacting it can be. Now imagine transcribing an edition of In Our Time, with rapid talking, occasional mumbles, similar-sounding speakers and frequent interruptions. I was recently pointed to Lee Borrell’s website, which has almost fifty transcribed editions of In Our Time. What’s even better is the fact that I had absolutely no idea that these editions even existed; they aren’t shown on the Radio 4 In Our Time website, and I can’t find any mention of them anywhere else on the web.
These ‘lost editions’ include topics such as Science and Religion, Childhood, Consciousness, The End of History and Quantum Gravity, and they’re discussed by guests including Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen and the sadly deceased Stephen Jay Gould. The term ‘treasure trove’ is bandied around quite casually these days, but for anyone who enjoys In Our Time, these transcripts are very valuable.
With the invaluable help of Ben Burry, I’ve cleaned up and reformatted the transcripts for the After Our Time wiki. So far, eleven transcripts are online, with more going up over the next few weeks. I hope you like them!
4 Comments so far...
Naomi Says:
18 August 2007 at 9:34 pm.
Well, I think *some* of these are up there: the Soul and Freedom for two, but certainly not all of them are. Maybe they didn’t meet Melvyn’s exacting standards…
Paul Mison Says:
19 August 2007 at 6:58 pm.
I’m not sure Fortunecity is the world’s most reliable hosting (I just connected, but only at the second attempt). Is it worth contacting the transcriber and asking if you can mirror those files here?
Adrian Says:
19 August 2007 at 7:03 pm.
There’s another copy of the transcripts online at http://www.angelfire.com/ego/inourtime/ which seems a bit more stable. In any case I have them all downloaded to my computer and they’ll be on the wiki pretty soon.
paulthomas Says:
21 June 2008 at 12:56 pm.
Adrian, is there a list of lost and forgotten ‘In Our Times’, to see if other listeners have managed to retain a bad hissy tape of them from way-back?