NOAA Voices from the Fisheries

As Multimedia Project Developer for NOAA’s Voices from the Fisheries project, I culled through NOAA’s large archive of audio and video interviews with fishermen, from Alaska to Alabama to Maine, that were recorded from the 1970s to the present by local organizations. Despite the differences in geography and time, there were many common themes within the interviews: a love of the sea and a solitary existence; the challenges of making a living fishing and the burden of tightening regulations; the craft behind the tools of the trade, including lobster traps, nets, and wooden boats. Based upon these observations, I developed themes to categorize the interviews: Life as a Fisherman, Challenges to Local Fishing Industries, Beyond the Boat, and Fishing Knowledge and Fishing Techniques. From the hundreds of interviews within the archive, I selected twenty to highlight that fit within the themes, and did what I could to improve the quality of the audio recordings, many of them recorded on tape and then digitized. The original interviews were over an hour long, and from that, I produced short, one to four-minute narrative-driven pieces; I chose to remove the interviewers’ questions in the pieces, so the listener only hears the voices of the fishermen and fisherwomen telling their stories. Upon completion of the editing, I consulted with NOAA’s web team and guided implementation of the multimedia on the website. We came up with a clean design that is easy to navigate, and that prioritizes listening to and watching the multimedia stories.