Teaching Digital Humanities with Oral History: The Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project and OHMS in the DH Classroom

Abstract

This article discusses the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—a free and open-source application for making oral histories available online—as a tool for teaching students about key principles in the digital humanities. It does so by describing the application of OHMS to interviews from the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project. By using OHMS in the digital humanities classroom, instructors can involve students in work on an ongoing project, while pushing them to ask critical questions about the digital world around them. This article thus suggests three areas of focus—metadata, markup, and hosting—for courses designed with OHMS in mind.

• archive
• digital humanities
• OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer)
• pedagogy
• project-based learning
• undergraduate education

I would like to thank Abigail Perkiss, assistant professor of history at Kean University, for her hard work on the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project, which made this endeavor possible. I would also like to thank the students in my fall 2014 Introduction to Digital Humanities course for their work in indexing interviews for our class project. Chelsey Mendoza deserves special mention for her ongoing contributions to the indexing effort. Finally, I would like to thank OHR editor Kathryn L. Nasstrom and two anonymous reviewers for their feedback, which dramatically improved this article.

Notes

¹Doug Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (January 2013): 95–106, doi:10.1093/ohr/oht031.

²Ken Woodard, “The Digital Revolution and Pre-Collegiate Oral History: Meditations on the Challenge of Teaching Oral History in the Digital Age,” Oral History Review 40, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2013): 325–31, doi:10.1093/ohr/oht097.

³Jill Goodman Gould and Gail Gradowski, “Using Online Video Oral Histories to Engage Students in Authentic Research,” Oral History Review 41, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014): 341–50, doi:10.1093/ohr/ohu031.

⁴Douglas A. Boyd, Janice W. Fernheimer, and Rachel Dixon, “Indexing as Engaging Oral History Research: Using OHMS to ‘Compose History’ in the Writing Classroom,” Oral History Review, 42, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2015): 352-367, doi:10.1093/ohr/ohv053.

⁵Adeline Koh, “A Letter to the Humanities: DH Will Not Save You,” Hybrid Pedagogy, April 19, 2015, http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/a-letter-to-the-humanities-dh-will-not-save-you, accessed August 14, 2015.

⁶Roopika Risam, “Across Two (Imperial) Cultures,” plenary address at the HASTAC 2015 conference, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, May 29, 2015. The text of Risam’s talk is available on her website: http://roopikarisam.com/uncategorized/across-two-imperial-cultures-2, accessed August 14, 2015. HASTAC stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory.

⁷Koh, “A Letter to the Humanities.”

⁸Adeline Koh, February 21, 2012, 9:38 a.m., comment on Ryan Cordell, “DH, Interdisciplinarity, and Curricular Incursion,” ryancordell.org, February 20, 2012, http://ryancordell.org/teaching/dh-interdisciplinarity-and-curricular-incursion, accessed August 14, 2015; “How Not to Teach Digital Humanities,” ryancordell.org, February 1, 2015, http://ryancordell.org/teaching/how-not-to-teach-digital-humanities, accessed August 14, 2015.

⁹Boyd, “OHMS,” 102-3.

¹⁰ Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South, Duke University Libraries Digital Collections, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/behindtheveil, accessed December 20, 2015.

¹¹The Nunn Center describes their own standards for formatting metadata, such as segment titles and GPS description, in “Indexing Interviews in OHMS: An Overview,” Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, last modified May 15, 2014, http://www.oralhistoryonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/OHMS-Indexing-guide-5-15-14.pdf.

¹²“Press: Statistics,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html, accessed August 14, 2015.

¹³Risam, “Across Two (Imperial) Cultures.”

¹⁴Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” 105.