Thrown into Collaboration: An Ethnography of Transcript Authorization

This chapter is an account of our fieldwork experience as researchers and interviewers in the Obninsk project – a large-scale collective enterprise aimed at collecting a corpus of in-depth biographical interviews with scientists and engineers who lived and worked in Obninsk, one of the science cities constructed as part of the Soviet nuclear programme. Once it was decided to publish the corpus of transcribed interviews online in an open digital archive, we had to consider getting agreements from our interlocutors to publish, or, as we came to call it in the project, to authorize the transcripts (translators and journalists use Russian     «

This chapter is an account of our fieldwork experience as researchers and interviewers in the Obninsk project – a large-scale collective enterprise aimed at collecting a corpus of in-depth biographical interviews with scientists and engineers who lived and worked in Obninsk, one of the science cities constructed as part of the Soviet nuclear programme. Once it was decided to publish the corpus of transcribed interviews online in an open digital archive, we had to consider getting agreements from...     »