Oral History and Digital Humanities

Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson

Introduction
  • Stories, formed by memory and performed in narrative either resonate and engage, are possibly preserved and imprinted in memory, or they go unremembered and are lost to time.History is made up of the stories of humanity, based on fragments preserved in time. 
  • How an oral history has been represented as an entity. 
  • Our very understanding of what an oral his tory actually is has been altered through time based on the tools at practitioners’ disposals.
  • Expanding range of technologies to collect preserve, understand, interpret, and retell stories. This book addresses the history of that process within oral history in the United States and examines how it connects with digital humanities scholarship.
  • It was technology from which oral history was born.
  • As analog recording technologies grew more affordable and accessible, oral history practice rapidly increased.
  • 1960: oral history had clearly emerged as a compelling methodology for documenting and understanding the individual in the study of history. 
  • One such debate emerged regarding the role of the recordings and the role of transcripts in the practice and in the purpose of oral history.

  • The introduction of the tape recorder in 1948 did, in my opinion, offer an approach to the record through another medium than writing. Although we have in many cases eliminated this new format for history by insisting on erasing the tape, once it has been transcribed, or by prohibiting the loan of the tape, or by assuming that the transcription is really the primary source . . . is it not possible that the distilling of the tape into a typescript has, even with the highest integrity and devotion, resulted in the modification of the primary source, the tape? Doesn’t strict allegiance to historical bibliography dictate that we acknowledge the typescript to be a secondary rather than a primary source? But above all, should not our oral history custodianship insist upon the preservation of the original tape?

  • The transcript, whether in the form of typescript or textual data, is easier and more efficient for a person to navigate, browse, or search. they are too expensive to produce on a mass scale
  • Audio and video have traditionally been very difficult and expensive to curate in an archival setting.
  • Without the transcript, the archive might have no more information about an oral history interview on its shelves beyond a name, a date, and the association with a particular project.
  • A typical oral history interview contains a massive amount of information— questions, answers, description, reflection, dialogue, laughter, silences, language, culture, worldview—yet, from the researcher’s perspective, oral history’s greatest value is found in the moments. 
  • Through technological advances, the Internet has become a practical way of making recorded sound and video available, opening up a wide range of possibilities for the presentation of material.
  • access has come to have a completely different meaning.
  • Media outlets such as YouTube or SoundCloud offer near instant and free distribution of audio and video oral histories, while digital repository and content management systems like CONTENTdm or Omeka, or even Drupal or WordPress. 
  • OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer)
  • New technologies have also posed concomitant potential threats, including increased vulnerability of narrators, infrastructure obsolescence, and a host of other ethical issues, particularly with heritage collections.
  • Reflect on the methodological and theoretical developments that have occurred in the practice of oral history in the United States since digital audio and video became practical working formats and on how those developments tie in to conversations in digital humanities.
  • Recognized early that digital technologies provided so much more than an improved recording experience.
  • The digital revolution has impacted almost every facet of oral history except for its one primary feature—the fact that an interview is still a dialogue, cre ated through the interaction of (at least) two human beings, one with a story to tell, and one who wants to hear it.

¿Existe una relación estrecha entre historia oral y HDs que nos haga pensar en esta como una metodología fundamental para nuestro campo? ¿Deberían las HDs defender esta metodología en el debate de los métodos de investigación históricos?

Por otra parte, qué significa que la historia oral sea «representada como una entidad»?

¿Cuáles son los retos de trabajar con historia oral? Cómo trabajar con fuentes que tal vez no son 100% verídicas, ya que están basadas en la memoria, y como investigadores tampoco caer en la trampa de «editar» lo dicho, de transformar la memoria de manera irresponsable?

¿Es necesario que todos los archivos históricos o de investigación sean de fácil consulta? ¿Por qué hay un debate sobre la extensión y uso de los archivos originales de entrevista? ¿Por qué pensamos que es mejor la transcripción?  ¿Cómo podemos hacer búsquedas de información donde nos aparezcan estos archivos? ¿Cómo serían los metadatos?

Me parece muy importante comprender cómo estas historias orales pasan a convertirse en fuentes sólidas de investigación. Es esto a través de cruzar varias entrevistas? Encontrar puntos en común?

Orality/Aurality (intro)
  • The analog framework made it extremely difficult to use anything but the text.
  • Positing that new digital technologies and tools would shift oral history’s focus to “the actual voice (orality, in all its meanings), and embodied voices and contexts in even richer video documentation, returns to the centre of immediacy and focus in oral history. ” Michael Frisch.
  • Sherna Berger Gluck was primarily concerned with intentionally creating a digital platform that presented oral histories in such a way as to maintain the unmediated orality/aurality of these interviews.
  • Having worked in radio, and drawing on his previous experiences crafting and producing This Car to the Ballpark and Mordecai Mordant, Charlie Hardy of West Chester University was aware of the way that audio oral histories, recorded in hi-fidelity, could be interwoven with other material to present powerful sto ries. Being digitally savvy, he was also one of the first to see the possibilities and opportunities presented by the evolving technologies, in terms of what they could offer for audio productions.
  • ‘I Can Almost See the Lights of Home’: A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky”
  • Oral History Association Award for a Non- Print Media Project

Sobre lo editorial. Vivíamos en un encuadre del texto, donde otras opciones no eran posibles. Ese encuadre lo pasamos hace mucho tiempo.

Discovery and Discourse (intro)
  • Gerald Zahavi: In 1996, he founded Talking History (a center for aural productions), and in 1997 he created the Journal for MultiMedia History, which utilized the platform of the Internet as a way of making history accessible to a wider audience through the use of media.
  • Tom Ikeda of Densho has been a pioneer in tackling the problems inherent with presenting and preserving materials for this type of undertaking.
  • If projects are to be made available in digital formats, one of the keys to discoverability is accurate and appropriate metadata.

  • Baylor Institute for Oral History, Elinor Maz. has spent more time than most oral historians have considering the implications of how programs describe their interviews.

  • Not all metadata is created equal, and she discusses the inherent poli tics of access and discoverability.
  • Into the second decade of digital oral history, we have moved beyond mere recording and digitization. 

  • The digital revolution has begun to change how the participants in the oral history process conceptualize projects, how they deal with ethical issues, how they process and preserve their materials, how they think about sound and video, how materials are made accessible, and how they “share authority.”

Clave dentro del rol editorial: cómo concebimos la tecnología, cuál es el rol que le damos, qué nos está faltando… dónde es realmente nuestro lugar de acción.

Oral History and Digital Humanities
  • … not everyone using oral history as a methodology is in a humanities field or is using digital technology, and many historians are themselves just dipping their toes into the digital humanities pool.
  • In fact, three of the tenets oral historians hold most dear—collaboration, a democratic impulse, and public scholarship—are also three of the leading concerns often cited by digital humanists.Add to this the interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) nature of both methodologies, together with the importance of contextualization/curation, and one finds that the two camps have more in common than they would have to separate them.
  • An emphasis on collaboration is one area where oral history and digital humanities are obviously shifting the traditional model in the academy.
  • “Digital Humanities = Co-creation
  • William Schneider’s work with Project Jukebox. Even in the early days of digital oral history projects, Schneider was working very closely with local groups on the design and implementation of platforms, and he discusses that process in his essay and follow-up interview.
  • The importance of recognizing this co-authorial role in interviewing projects is also reflected in the (United States) Oral History Association’s Principles and Best Practices document, where responsibilities to communities are spelled out under item number eight in the “Post Interview” section. 
  • THATCamps, OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer), QGIS (Quantum GIS), Feminist Oral History Research Project
  • There is a democratic spirit that is common to oral history and digital humanities that engenders a sense that the materials created, shared, generated, or parsed belong to everyone—not just to the educated or the well-to-do, but to those outside the university walls as well as those within. It is reflected in a com mon sentiment among oral historians concerning the importance of “history from the bottom up,” and it is also mirrored in the way that many digital humanities gatherings are conducted.
  • Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0: Digital Humanities have a utopian core shaped by its genealogical descent from the counterculture-cyberculture intertwinglings of the 60s and 70s. This is why it affirms the value of the open, the infinite, the expansive, the uni versity/museum/archive/library without walls, the democratization of culture and scholarship, even as it affirms the value of large-scale statistically grounded methods (such as cultural analytics) that collapse the boundaries between the humanities and the social and natural sciences .
  • The democratic urge is not simply to include people in the dissemination of knowledge at the end of a project, but to include as many diverse groups as possible in the generation of the information in the first place.
  • For the digital humanities, information is not a commodity to be controlled, but a social good to be shared and reused,”
  • Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines . . . Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds. … It means becoming engaged in collecting, assembling, sifting, structuring, and interpreting corpora. All of which is to say that we consider curation on par with traditional narrative scholarship.
  • Curation also implies custodial responsibilities with respect to the remains of the past as well as interpretive, meaning-making responsibilities with respect to the present and future. 
  • the success of contemporary oral history projects is now regularly being measured by metrics pertaining to accessibility, discov ery, engagement, usability, reuse, and a project’s impact on both community and on scholarship.The once modular and disconnected roles of the inter viewer, the scholar, the archivist, and the technologist have converged in excit ing ways. Archives are moving away from the role of gatekeepers while shifts in open-access publishing and digital scholarship are dramatically shaping new directions of scholarly and community discourse. Oral history projects today are digital projects, built on a tradition established by a generation of creative innovators and explorers.