Jeffrey H. Brodsky oral history collection, 1991-2021, bulk 2000-2012

Four versions of Brodsky's professional highlight reel as part of his application materials to Columbia University's Oral History Master of Arts program.

Materials from Brodsky's time as a student at Columbia University that could not be linked to another project. Materials include an audio file containing an interview with Scott Burkhardt about President Obama's election in 2008, an audio file containing an interview with an unidentified Associated Press journalist about the nature of entertainment journalism, and several files relating to audio settings and system preferences, including audio files for testing sound levels.

Project materials for an unfinished oral history project surrounding White House press correspondents. This project was ultimately left unfinished when Brodsky settled on his thesis topic covered in My First Campaign.

Materials in this sub-series relate to Brodsky's thesis project titled "My First Campaign," in which he interviewed dozens of current and former elected officials about their very first campaign. Materials have been arranged by interviewee, and all related materials are grouped together. There are pre-interview recordings, unedited audio and video of the interviews, photographs taken during the interviews, multiple drafts of transcripts, notes indicating follow up questions for future interview sessions, and supporting materials including ending clips, multiple title scene options, etc. Please note, many duplicated photographs were weeded from this series.

Some interviews have full transcripts, some have transcripts with only the answers transcribed and not the questions, some have excerpts, some have different versions of the same transcript, some have a combination of variations. Any transcripts marked "final" (Slade Gorton, George Pataki, John Engler) were originally described that way by Brodsky. Some interviews have the same audio or video multiple times, but with different file formats (see Mitch Daniels, Gary Hart, Olusegun Obasanjo, Richard Thornburgh, Donald Rumsfeld, Alejandro Toledo, Martín Torrijos). These were kept in the collection to highlight the variety of file formats used at this time and also to illustrate how a working oral historian saved and described material. These files are listed as "audio alternative format" or "video alternative format."

Brodsky sometimes conducted interviews over the phone or conducted a pre-interview phone call. These recordings are listed as "phone call" (see Birch Bayh, Chris Christie). He also often had multiple camera angles for each interview. While the exact type of equipment he used is unknown, he does make mention of a Flip Video camera (see James Florio), and you can see the setup of his equipment in certain videos and photos (see Mary Landrieu, Hilda Solis, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman).

This project was not without the usual technical difficulties from this time period. See Richard Thornburgh video for an example of a recorded video with no sound. One alternative camera angle video file for Donald Rumsfeld was corrupted and was removed from the collection.

Generally, as with all OHAC collections, "audio part 1" will line up with "video part 1," "audio part 2" with "video part 2," and so on. It is a less than perfect match with this collection, because the audio files were captured independently from the video files, instead of the audio files being extracted from the video files.

Due to missing most of the original metadata, it is difficult to determine what interviews were conducted specifically for Brodsky's work on his thesis at Columbia and interviews conducted for other purposes, either at Columbia or outside of it. It is possible that some interviews in this series were conducted while he was a student at Columbia but not specifically intended to be used for his thesis, or they were conducted at some point after his studies.

The description of this sub-series is meant to highlight the very "in progress" nature of the work. This is not a traditional oral history collection that contains neatly edited and formatted transcripts. These are the working files of an oral historian from the early 2010s, and the materials are meant to reflect that.

Photographs and one video file from Brodsky's graduation from Columbia in May 2012.