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Abstract
Digital technologies and tools are transforming the presentation, interpretation, and use of oral history. Using a case study of the Australian Generations Oral History Project, this article focuses on how we have documented interviews and are presenting and interpreting them through writing in online formats that integrate aural material. I consider the interpretative opportunities and challenges posed in four elements of our digital oral history practice: the online discussion forum though which interviewers share their account of each interview; the searchable timed summaries that are linked to the audio recording for each interview; the ZOTERO database that we use to access, search, and share the material generated by the project; and an aural history book that will combine text and audio.
Notes
1Russell Elliott, interviewed by Nicole Curby, January 23 and 24, 2012, Australian Generations Oral History Project, National Library of Australia, TRC 6300-39. Hear this extract at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6223258/5-1819, accessed July 23, 2014.
2“Oral History in the Digital Age,” Special Issue, Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013). See also Douglas A. Boyd and Mary. A Larson, eds., Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Michael Frisch, “Oral History and the Digital Revolution: Toward a Post-documentary Sensibility,” in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, eds., The Oral History Reader (London: Routeledge, 2006), 103-4; Michael Frisch and Douglas Lambert, “Case Study: Between the Raw and the Cooked in Oral History: Notes from the Kitchen,” in Donald Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 333-348. See also the resources and essays on the Oral History in the Digital Age website, at http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/, accessed October 17, 2015. For details about how the Australian Generations Project managed ethical issues posed by digital and online technologies, see Kevin Bradley and Anisa Puri, “Creating an Oral History Archive: Digital Opportunities and Ethical Issues,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016).
3Steven High, “Telling Stories: A Reflection on Oral History and New Media,” Oral History 38, no. 1 (2010): 101-112. For reflections on the Australian Generations interview process, see Nicole Curby, “Confession and Catharsis: Crafting a Life Story and Charting a History of Emotions,” Circa: The Journal of the Professional Historians Association 4 (2014): 53-58.
4For example, the Millennium Memory Bank project in Britain (see April Gallwey, “The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research: The Case of the Millennium Memory Bank,” Oral History 41, no. 1 (2013): 37-50). For the Australian Generations Oral History Project see http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/australian-generations/, accessed July 21, 2014. Our project is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, LP100200270.
5For example, the Edwardians project led by Paul Thompson (Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975]; the Australia 1938 project (see Alistair Thomson, “Biography of an Archive: ‘Australia 1938’ and the Vexed Development of Australian Oral History,” Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3 [2014]: 425-49); or the Rosie the Riveter Revisited Project in the United States (Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change [Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1987]).
6Susan H. Armitage and Sherna Berger Gluck, “Reflections on Women’s Oral History: An Exchange,” in Perks and Thomson, The Oral History Reader, 74 (first published in Frontiers 19, no. 3 [1998]: 1-11.)
7Armitage and Gluck, “Reflections on Women’s Oral History.” The vast collections of Holocaust oral histories produced since the 1980s have been an exception to the rule, in large part because of the political will and substantial funding available for such work. See Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2015).
8Alistair Thomson, “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History,” Oral History Review 34, no. 1 (2007): 49-70.
9While some oral historians argue that we should be recording with digital video and thus capturing visual as well as aural meanings (see Peter B. Kaufman, “Oral History in the Video Age,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1 [2013]: 1-7), we believe that for some purposes there are virtues in audio-only recordings, and not only because it is cheaper. The audio-video debate can wait for another time, but defenses of the audio interview include: 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): 135-153; Simon Bradley, “History to Go: Oral History, Audiowalks and Mobile Media,” Oral History 40, no. 1 (2012): 99-110; Siobhán McHugh, “The Affective Power of Sound: Oral History on Radio,” Oral History Review 39, no. 2 (2012): 187-206.
10Follow this link to hear presentations by the research team at our conference, Australian Generations: Researching 20th Century Lives and Memories, held in Melbourne, October 30-31, 2014: https://soundcloud.com/australiangenerationsproject. Edited versions of these presentations will be published in an Australian Generations theme issue of the journal Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016).
11See Alistair Thomson, “Australian Generations? Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016).
12Curby, “Confession and Catharsis.” Although our interview guide focused on the life story that each narrator wanted to tell, interviewers were asked to stretch and probe that storytelling; they were provided guidance on a range of historical topics and encouraged to “drill down” on such topics where they seemed to be a significant part of a person’s life story.
13In Britain, for example, the Mass Observation project finds it easiest to recruit older middle-class white women to write about their lives; see Dorothy Sheridan, David Bloome, and Brian Street, Writing Ourselves: Mass Observation and Literacy Practices (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000); and see http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm, accessed July 21, 2014.
14On the value of such contextual information for researchers using an oral history archive, see: Gallwey, “The Rewards of Using Archived Oral Histories in Research”; Malin Thor Tureby, “To Hear with the Collection: The Contextualisation and Recontextualisation of Archived Interviews,” Oral History 41, no. 2 (2013): 63-74; James E. Fogarty, “Oral history and Archives: Documenting Context,” in Thomas Charlton, Lois E. Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., Handbook of Oral History (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2006), 207-236.
15Extracts based on Australian Generations interviewer forum postings, to be archived at the National Library of Australia, Canberra, sealed for a period of years yet to be confirmed.
16David Cooper, interviewed by Alistair Thomson, March 12 and 14, 2013, Australian Generations Oral History Project, NLA, TRC 6300-160, http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6290926/3-3074, accessed July 21, 2014.
17Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “Introduction: Toward an Ethnography of Practice,” in Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, eds., Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1-19.
18Thomson, “Australian Generations?”
19See Douglas A. Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” Oral History Review 40 no. 1 (2013): 95-106; Douglas A. Boyd, “Achieving the Promise of Oral History in a Digital Age,” in Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 285-302; Douglas A. Boyd, “‘I Just Want to Click on It to Listen’: Oral History Archives, Orality and Usability,” in Boyd and Larson, Oral History and Digital Humanities; Dean Rehberger, “Getting Oral History Online: Collections Management Applications,” Oral History Review 40, no. 1 (2013): 83-94; Stacey Zembrzycki, “Bringing Stories to Life: Using New Media to Disseminate and Critically Engage with Oral History Interviews,” Oral History 41, no. 1 (2013): 98-107; Lambert and Frisch, “Digital Curation through Information Cartography.”
20See Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” and Kevin Bradley, “Built on Sound Principles: Audio Management and Delivery at the National Library of Australia,” IFLA Journal 40, no. 3 (2014): 186-94. This link will take you to all the Australian Generation interviews that are accessible online through the National Library catalogue: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=my_parent:%22(AuCNL)5973925%22&iknowwhatimean=1&filter[]=access_type:%22All%20online%22
21The NLA online system has the added advantage of providing a URL reference for a selected audio segment. The URL can be pasted into an article and used as a hot link direct to that online section of the recording—as I have done in this article. At present (2015) the Library does not enable online timed summaries to be searched via Google, on the grounds that once an interview is accessible via Google it is not easy to ensure that it can be taken down from the Internet if required (take-down is a central ethical plank of the Library’s approach to online access, but given the increasing importance of Google searches, that policy may change).
22For difficulties radio producers face using life history interviews, see Michelle Rayner, “Commentary: The Radio Documentary and Oral History: Challenges and Opportunities,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016). See also McHugh, “The Affective Power of Sound.”
23Ruth Apps, interviewed by Frank Heimans, April 11 and 13, 2013, Australian Generations Oral History Project, NLA, TRC 6300-52, at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6252043/0-4718.
24For software developed or adapted by oral historians, see Stacey Zembrzycki, “Bringing Stories to Life: Using New Media to Disseminate and Critically Engage with Oral History Interviews,” Oral History 41, no. 1 (2013): 98-107; Rehberger, “Getting Oral History Online: Collections Management Applications”; Boyd, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free.”
25Lambert and Frisch, “Digital Curation through Information Cartography,” 69.
26The radio programs can be accessed at http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/australian-generations/category/radio/. See ABC Radio National producer Michelle Rayner’s talk at the Melbourne conference in 2014, at https://soundcloud.com/australiangenerationsproject; published as Michelle Rayner, “Commentary.”
27McHugh, “The Affective Power of Sound.”
28Katie Holmes, Australian Generations Conference; hear presentation excerpt with interview recording at https://soundcloud.com/australiangenerationsproject—click to select Conference Session 2, then slide the elapsed time button on the audio player to 12.46.
29Katie Holmes, “Does It Matter If She Cried?: Recording Emotion in the Australian Generations Oral History Project," Oral History Review 44 (forthcoming).
30For a more detailed analysis of this interview, see Katie Holmes, “Talking about Mental Illness: Life Histories and Mental Health in Modern Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 1 (2016).
31Steve Cohen, “Shifting Questions: New Paradigms for Oral History in a Digital World,” Oral History Review 40 no. 1 (2013): 154-167; Rayner, “Commentary.”
32Anisa Puri and Alistair Thomson, Australian Lives: An Aural History (Melbourne, AUS: Monash University Publishing, 2016). For an example of a print and online publication that works this way, see the NLA’s Web-based publication about their Forgotten Australians oral history project, at http://www.nla.gov.au/sites/default/files/ohbooklet_forgottenaustralians.pdf, accessed July 21, 2014. On digital books see: Robert Darnton, “The New Age of the Book,” The New York Review of Books 46, no. 5 (March 18, 1999), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1999/mar/18/the-new-age-of-the-book/, accessed July 21, 2014; Paul Turnbull, “Historians, Computing and the World-Wide-Web,” Australian Historical Studies 41, no. 2 (2010): 141-44.
33Linda Shopes, “Editing Oral History for Publication,” Oral History Forum d’Histoire Orale 31 (2011), at http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/view/385, accessed April 29, 2014.
34Leslie Robinson, interviewed by Hamish Sewell, April 7 and 8, 2014, Australian Generations Oral History Project, NLA, TRC 6300-271, extract at http://www.nla.gov.au/amad/nla.oh-vn6504265/0-4681.
35Readers-listeners will also face some technical issues. A prospective listener will first need to click and agree to the National Library’s end user agreement, and then readers of the e-book will always be taken to the start of an audio segment, which may not exactly line up with the start of the quote in the book.
36See https://www.historypin.org/map/#!/geo:-25.101922,132.863721/zoom:4/tags:Generations/. On using ZeeMaps software to create an oral history “memoryscape” of place, see Zembrzycki, “Bringing Stories to Life.” See also Tom Butler, “The Historical Hearing Aid: Located Oral History from the Listener's Perspective,” and Steven High, “Mapping Memories of Displacement: Oral History, Memoryscapes, and Mobile Methodologies,” in Shelley Trower, ed., Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 193-216 and 217-31.
37See Giles John Rollestone, “Lost in Transcription: Enhancing the Typographic Description of Prosody in Written Discourse through Dynamic Typography,” DPhil thesis, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/xqufdsl10i2sk9v/Giles_Rollestone_PhD_Thesis.pdf, accessed July 21, 2014.
38Bradley and Puri, “Creating an Oral History Archive.”