Transcription Service Valuable for DHi’s Prison Writing Archive

1. Transcription Service Valuable for DHi’s Prison Writing Archive General transcription services help academicians prepare the essay with proper planning, data gathering, and proofreading. Essay writing is not limited to the academic field, as initiatives in this direction such as that of the DHi, demonstrate. MOS Legal Transcription Company 8596 E. 101st Street, Suite H www.legaltranscriptionservice.com 918-221-7810 Tulsa, OK 74133

2. Academic institutions make writing an important part of their curriculum and the academic essay is very significant for students. Writing essays involve critical thinking and it challenges students and researchers to scrutinize arguments, develop their points more thoroughly and clarify thoughts. General transcription services help academicians in preparing the essay with proper planning, data gathering, and proofreading. Essay writing is not limited to the academic field, as new initiatives such as that of the Digital Humanities Initiative, better known as DHi, demonstrate. In December 2017, the DHi and Doran Larson, the Walcott-Bartlett Chair of Ethics and Christian Evidences celebrated the entry of the 1,000th essay into DHI’s American Prison Writing Archive (APWA). The act of writing is useful for anyone to express themselves in a more logical way and also to develop their writing skills. DHi has made essay writing popular among prisoners and encourages them to express their innermost feelings and genuine concerns. Essays as Valuable Means of Expression DHi’s program for prison inmates was initiated in 2009 when Larson put out a call for essay prison staffs and incarcerated people about the life inside the jail. The archive has grown to more than 1,200 responses in paper form and more than 1,100 essays online. The essays focus on “what is it like for you to get life in prison”. The 1,000thessay, in its handwritten form is four pages in length and describes the writer devolving into a wraith, a shadow of his former self, then ascending to anger and then falling into a period of not caring and in the end emerging into a feeling of hope. The original request for submission of essays had a deadline on August 2011, necessary to meet the publishing schedule for a book Larson planned to edit. But the essays kept coming and it never stopped. In 2014, Michigan State University Press published a selection of letters as Fourth City: Essay From the Prison in America, the largest collection to date of non-fiction writing by currently incarcerated Americans writing about the prison life and their experience. According to Larson, the urge to build the APWA grew from the clear indication that, once invited, incarcerated people would not give up the chance to tell their stories. Now, the archive has enough material to fill more than 16 books the size of Fourth City, a 338-page and 7”X 10” volume mentioned above. The significance of projects such as the above is made clear in an article written by a law student and published in www.lawteacher.net. The writer draws from an article written by a former inmate, Mathew. According to Mathew, maximum security prisons don’t rehabilitate prisoners, they rather make them worse. He further added that inmates spend twenty-four hours a day in their cell in total isolation, and it is hard for them to www.legaltranscriptionservice.com 918-221-7810

3. function properly in society after spending that amount of time in total isolation without any human contact. Most prisoners have developed some sort of psychological illness and in the case of those who had it before, their situation is even worse. Prisoners are abused most of the time. Criminologists argue that this type of incarceration is inflicting punishment rather than rehabilitating those prisoners. Individuals also face administrative separatism. This article has received considerable attention from scholars, researchers, criminologists, sociologists and more research is being done on the maximum security aspect of prison. How Transcription Is Important Last December’s celebration also recognized the introduction of a new transcription tool that allows volunteers to more easily enter handwritten letters in text format into the archive. The DHi Collection Development Team worked with the consultants hired to construct the transcription tool. The APWA received early funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In the beginning of 2017 the association was awarded a three-year NEH grant that has enabled it to double its size and also increase its faceted search capacities as well as further request essays especially from prison staff. The mission of the APWA is to replace speculation on and misinterpretation of prisons, imprisoned people and prison workers with first person witness by those who live and work in that environment. Essays written by prison inmates reveal the physical and mental condition of prisoners. In this initiative, essays are obtained through a prisoner- support newsletter and a call for essays in the Prison Legal News. All submissions are read thoroughly and with rare exceptions, scanned and ingested. All handwritten essays are transcribed. Anyone with firsthand experience inside a US carceral institution today is eligible to submit essays. This includes prison employees and volunteers. These employees or volunteers materially shape the day-to-day conditions in which incarcerated people live and who are in turn deeply affected by their work. A truly inclusive vision of life inside requires the testimony of everyone who lives, works or volunteers in prison today. Given the importance of essays as a means of self-expression and as a vehicle that reveals the travails and challenges people in various settings face, it is important to bring these before the public. Mostly, these essays may be in handwritten format and have to be transcribed into accurate text. Text-to-text transcription service provided by general transcription companiescomes in useful for institutions pioneering projects such as the Prison Writing Archive. Mostly, these services are affordable and the major advantage is the customized turnaround time ensured so that the project does not get stalled. www.legaltranscriptionservice.com 918-221-7810