Oral History in the Digital Age: Beyond the Raw and the Cooked

Abstract

Based on the keynote at the 2014 Australian Generations research conference, this article maps the landscape of oral history practice in the digital age. Surveying all that is changing (and much that is not) it locates digital content management of interview recordings—exemplified by Australian Generations—at the centre of emerging practice. More broadly, the article explores meaningful access to content within and across interviews as a curatorial space and sensibility with transformative implications, given its location midway between the traditional focus either on conducting and archiving interviews (the raw), or producing and disseminating documentary or scholarly outputs (the cooked).

Notes

1 This article is an outgrowth of the keynote lecture for the international research conference, ‘Australian Generations: Researching 20th Century Lives and Memories', Monash University, Caulfield, 31 October 2014. The keynote was a public presentation at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 October 2014. For a general overview of Australian Generations in the digital context engaged in the keynote, see the article in this issue by Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri, ‘Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues’, Australian Historical Studies, 47, no. 1 (2016); and Alistair Thomson, ‘Digital Aural History: An Australian Case Study’, Oral History Review (in press, 2016).

2 Among the many introductions to the field, several older but still relevant texts emphasising this dimension include: Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Ronald Grele, Envelopes of Sound, 2nd edn (New York: Praeger, 1982); Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991); and Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990).

3 Works touching on this issue from the vantage of oral and public history include: David Glassberg, ‘Public History and the Study of Memory', The Public Historian 18, no. 2 (1996): 7–23; David Lowenthal et al., ‘Roundtable Responses to Glassberg’, The Public Historian 19, no. 2 (1997): 31–72; Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010); Alistair Thomson, Michael Frisch and Paula Hamilton, ‘The Memory and History Debates: An International Perspective’, Oral History 22, no. 2 (1994): 33–43; and Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, eds, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).

4 This tension between broader issues and the hands-on practicality of interviewing is evident even in the best of the introductory guidebooks to oral history practice. See Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3rd edn (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), which is so much richer than its curiously operational main title suggests. I have addressed this issue more extensively in Michael Frisch, ‘Three Dimensions and More: Oral History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method’, in Handbook of Emergent Methodologies in Qualitative Research, eds Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Patricia Leavey (New York: Guilford Press, 2008), 221–38.

5 See, for an applied example, Robert Warren et al., ‘Restoring the Human Voice to Oral History: The Audio-Video Barn Website', Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 107–25 (Special Issue: Oral History in the Digital Age, Doug Boyd, Guest Editor). More broadly, see Douglas A. Boyd, ‘“I Just Want to Click on it and Listen”: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability', in Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement, eds Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 77–96. See also Kevin Bradley, ‘Built on Sound Principles: Audio Management and Delivery at the National Library of Australia’, IFLA Journal, 40, no. 3 (2014): 186–94.

6 I have explored this perspective more extensively in Michael Frisch, ‘Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Towards a Post-Documentary Sensibility’, in The Oral History Reader, 2nd edn, eds Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006), 102–14.

7 See, in general, Boyd and Hamilton, and the excellent broader overview in Thomson.

8 Special Issue: Oral History in the Digital Age, Doug Boyd, Guest Editor, Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013).

9 Thomson; see also Doug Boyd, ‘OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free', Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 95–106 (Special Issue: Oral History in the Digital Age). My colleague Douglas Lambert and I walk through an applied example of emerging indexing approaches in Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert, ‘Case Study: Beyond the Raw and the Cooked in Oral History: Notes from the Kitchen', in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald Ritchie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333–48.

10 Still useful and relevant, though increasingly challenged by modern approaches to both transcription and broader indexing and annotation, is the classic guide by Willa K. Baum, Transcribing and Editing Oral History (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1977, 1991). See also David King Dunaway, ‘Transcription: Shadow or Reality?’ Oral History Review 12 (1984): 113–17.

11 This project is among a range of public history examples discussed in Michael Frisch, ‘From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back', in Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, eds Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene and Laura Koloski (Philadelphia: Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 124–37. More broadly, see Hamilton and Shopes.

12 Frisch, ‘Oral History and the Digital Revolution'. See a good example, Mark Tebeau, ‘Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era’, Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 25–35; and broader reflections, Steve Cohen, ‘Shifting Questions: New Paradigms for Oral History in a Digital World', Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 154–67. See also Boyd and Larson.

13 Thomson; Bradley.

14 Douglas Lambert and Michael Frisch, ‘Digital Curation Through Information Cartography: A Commentary on Oral History in the Digital Age from a Content Management Point of View', Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 135–53; Douglas Lambert and Michael Frisch, ‘Meaningful Access to Audio and Video Passages: A Two-Tiered Approach for Annotation, Navigation, and Cross-Referencing Within and Across Oral History Interviews', Oral History in the Digital Age. http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06meaningful-access-to-audio-and-video-passages-2.

15 The song ‘Papa's on the Housetop' can be accessed by title search at www.youtube.com, in this original version by Leroy Carr, as well as other covers by various artists. My musician friends and I came across it as part of a broader project researching music of the Depression era, which we have presented in multimedia formats combining live performance and large-screen projection of documentary photographs from the period, interspersed with oral history excerpts and other documents. For examples of this audio-documentary presentation form, an approach resonant with new modes of oral history presentation discussed in this article, search YouTube for ‘The 198 String Band', which leads to three song-photo combinations as well as video of a performance at the Columbia University Oral History MA Program. See also www.musicfromthedepression.com.