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Abstract
Theories concerning the nature of oral history have changed over the years, and scholars’ understandings of the methodology have been heavily influenced by the media used to record, archive, and present interviews. As practitioners have moved, in turn, from privileging typewritten transcripts to emphasizing the importance of the original tape recordings and exploring such new media as video, digital formats, and highly produced multimedia outputs, our perspective on what an oral history is has deepened. This essay reviews a series of articles from the 1950s through the present day and traces the evolution of oral history media and our increasing appreciation of oral history’s intricacies.
I sincerely thank OHR guest editor Teresa Barnett and OHR editor Kathy Nasstrom for inviting me to write this piece. They provided me with an opportunity to think about oral history methodology through a different lens, and they then made invaluable contributions throughout the editorial process.
Notes
1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 7.
2 Mark Federman, “What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message?,” accessed January 23, 2015, http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm.
3 Louis Shores, “Directions for Oral History,” in Oral History at Arrowhead: The Proceedings of the First National Colloquium on Oral History, ed. Elizabeth Dixon and James Mink (Los Angeles, CA: Oral History Association, 1966), 39.
4 Louis Starr, “Oral History: Problems and Prospects,” Advances in Librarianship (1971): 275-304.
5 Dixon and Mink, Oral History at Arrowhead, 22-23; Louis Starr, “History, Warm,” Columbia University Forum 5 (Fall 1962): 29.
6 Vaughan Davis Bornet, “Oral History Can Be Worthwhile,” American Archivist 18, no. 3 (July 1955): 247, 253.
7 Starr, “History, Warm,” 29.
8 Dale Treleven, “Oral History, Audio Technology, and the TAPE System,” International Journal of Oral History 2, no. 1 (1981): 27-28.
9 Dixon and Mink, Oral History at Arrowhead, 21-23; Treleven, 29.
10 Dan Sipe, “The Future of Oral History and Moving Images,” Oral History Review 19, no. 1-2 (Spring, Fall 1991): 76; see also Treleven, 29.
11 Dixon and Mink, Oral History at Arrowhead.
12 Shores, “Directions for Oral History,” 39.
13 Shores, 38; emphasis original.
14 Shores, 40-41.
15 Shores, 44-46.
16 Shores, 39.
17 “Goals and Guidelines for Oral History: Report of the Subcommittee on Goals and Guidelines for the Oral History Association,” (Oral History Association, 1968), 7.
18 “Goals and Guidelines for Oral History,” 6-8.
19 Michael Frisch, “Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Toward a Post-Documentary Sensibility,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (New York: Routledge, 2006), 103.
20 While large-scale use of access points beyond the transcript did not happen until after 2000, there were certainly a number of pioneers who were working on alternate approaches prior to that, including William Schneider, Sherna Gluck, Charles Hardy III, and Michael Frisch.
21 Dennis Tedlock, “Learning to Listen: Oral History as Poetry,” in Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory, and Practice of Oral History and Oral Testimony, ed. Ronald Grele (Chicago,IL: Precedent Publishing, 1975), 113; emphasis and formatting original.
22 Tedlock, 122-123.
23 Tedlock, 12.
24 TAPE stands for “Timed Access to Pertinent Excerpts.” Treleven, 26.
25 Treleven, 31-35.
26 Treleven, 34.
27 Treleven, 27, 30.
28 Shores, 41.
29 W. Richard Whitaker, “Why Not Try Videotaping Oral History?,” Oral History Review 9 (1981): 115.
30 Whitaker, 116.
31 Whitaker, 116-118; US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI Inflation Calculator, accessed January 24, 2015, http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=9%2C000&year1=1981&year2=2014.
32 Whitaker, 121.
33 Pamela Henson and Terri Schorzman, “Videohistory: Focusing on the American Past,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 620-623.
34 Henson and Schorzman, 622. It should be noted at this point that many of the larger shifts in media practice in oral history were championed by people from academic disciplines other than history. Louis Shores was a librarian, William Schneider, Dennis Tedlock, and David Dunaway all have strong anthropological backgrounds, and Dan Sipe’s work is grounded in filmmaking as well as in history. Later in this article, the contributions of artist Holly Ewald and cognitive psychologist Steve Cohen are also important in shaping how we consider our interaction with oral histories.
35 Henson and Schorzman, 618, 624.
36 Henson and Schorzman, 627.
37 Sipe, “The Future of Oral History,” 77.
38 Sipe, 80.
39 Sipe, 84.
40 Sipe, 80.
41 Sipe, 78.
42 David King Dunaway, “Transcription: Shadow or Reality?,” Oral History Review 12 (1984): 115.
43 Dunaway, 116.
44 Dunaway, 115.
45 Dunaway’s work Writing the Southwest was a highly contextualized project that made the most of a range of media and formats. Working with authors from the American Southwest, he produced a series of award-winning radio broadcasts that included biographical information, oral history excerpts, and recordings of the writers reading their own work, and these audio productions were paired with a book of the same title (New York: Plume, 1995).
46 One of the few early technology adopters and authors on the subject who seemed to understand the idea of context in the same way as Dunaway was William Schneider.
47 Mary Larson, “Potential, Potential, Potential: Oral History and the World Wide Web,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001): 596-603.
48 Frisch, “Digital Revolution,” 103.
49 Frisch, 103.
50 Frisch, 104-114.
51 Brad Rakerd’s article, as well as the pieces by Anne Valk and Holly Ewald and Steve Cohen, were all part of the 2013 special issue of the Oral History Review (vol. 40, no. 1) that showcased the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) initiative. OHDA was an immense undertaking, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, hosted by Michigan State University, managed by Doug Boyd, and made possible by a group of eight partners and approximately seventy participants or contributors. The primary result was an interactive website that is continually being updated and that provides information on everything from best practices and standards to ethics and larger theoretical concerns. The issue of the Oral History Review was associated with this larger effort, and the online version of the journal provided direct, embedded links to various media to expand the experience.
52 It is still part of a larger, ongoing conversation on ethics, the details of which are beyond the scope of this article.
53 Simon Bradley, “History to Go: Oral History, Audiowalks and Mobile Media,” Oral History 40, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 99-110.
54 Bradley, “History to Go.”
55 Bradley, 101.
56 Anne Valk and Holly Ewald, “Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 8-24.
57 Steve Cohen, “Shifting Questions: New Paradigms for Oral History in a Digital World,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013):154-167.
58 Cohen, 157.
59 Cohen, 157-164.
60 Cohen, 157. This is also a point that has been stressed by William Schneider for years, most notably in his book, … So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2002).
61 Larson, “Potential,” 602.