During the Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Public Service that took place during the 2017 Stanford University Homecoming Reunion Weekend in October, 2017, Jeongeun Park presented on her research assistance for the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University.
The Project has interviewed almost forty descendants of Chinese railroad workers to recover the experiences of those workers through oral history. “This summer, I completed the transcription of all available interviews,” she explained. “While employing Google’s Cloud Speech application programming interface (API) was a breakthrough in the transcription, I also edited the interviews for human variability. Following the completion of the preliminary transcripts, I have been analyzing them on both macro and micro scales.
“As the descendants are several generations apart from the railroad workers of interest, mortality and language have erected barriers to the recovery of an ancestor’s history. Nevertheless, these oral histories speak to the role that the self-identification as a descendant of the Railroad workers plays in the formation of the modern Chinese-American identity.”
Great work, Jeongeun!
