oral history essays

What is Oral History?

“Oral History,” the British oral historian Paul Thompson said, “is a history built around people. It thrusts life into history itself and widens its scope. It allows heroes not just from the leaders, but also from the unknown majority of the people. It encourages teachers and students to become fellow-workers. It brings history into, and out of, the community. It helps the less privileged […] towards dignity and self-confidence. It makes for contact – and hence understanding – between social classes, and between generations. […] In short it makes for fuller human beings.”

Oral history is a method of historical and social scientific inquiry and analysis that includes life histories, storytelling, narratives, and qualitative research. Most commonly, interviewers sit down together with narrators to help them tell, record, and archive their life stories or their memories of a specific event, person, or phase in their life.

The practice of oral history is universal: we all engage in oral history practices in our everyday lives, in telling our stories or listening to others. At every step, oral history is grounded in local knowledge and is connected to global experiences. As a method of exploring the past, oral history builds people’s capacity to appreciate the complexities of history, to critically evaluate the role of history in society, and, perhaps most importantly, to participate in the making of history. Oral history has become a powerful tool for Indigenous peoples, women, migrants, working people, minorities, communities, organizations, and other groups to find out about their own past, to tell their stories, and to “write” themselves (back) into history.

As a result, oral history has emerged as a movement to democratize history: to make history more accessible to a wider public, to include a greater diversity of people in the histories that are written and told, and to encourage more people to participate in the practice of history. The full value of oral history as an instrument for individual and community empowerment can be realized through teaching and training in the practice, and in interpretation and analysis of the meanings of stories. Such training increases the quality of oral history and its relevance to everyday life, qualitative research practices, and public policy.

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Six Rules for Creating an Oral History

The original chroniclers of punk on how they did it.

When Jean Stein and George Plimpton began compiling their book American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy, using the oral history format, little did they realize that they were inventing a revolutionary new literary genre that, ten years later, would land them on the best-seller list.

Stein and Plimpton’s masterpiece, Edie: American Girl, published in 1982 perfected, if not invented, the narrative oral history genre. In these times when the term “oral history” is used to define anything from a single, edited interview to a collection of interviews published as an anthology, we decided to clarify our definition of the “narrative oral history.” For the record, when we use this term, we mean a book of edited passages from a collection of interviews and additional texts that are tightly woven together into an accurate chronology, creating a carefully crafted narrative.  Stein says it best in the introduction to The Times of Robert Kennedy , where she uses the term “oral narrative” to describe their book, adding that, “Oral history has been largely thought of as the collecting of interview transcripts for storage in archives in order to provide historians with research material. Somewhat less common is the use of interview transcripts as a literary form, in which the raw transcripts are edited, arranged, and allowed to stand for themselves, without the intervention by the historian.”

Stein and Plimpton chose their subject well. Not only was Edie Sedgwick a relatively forgotten celebrity when their book was first published, but Edie : American Girl shed new light on a chaotic period of American history with a radical new literary format that inspired Norman Mailer to declare, “This is the book of the Sixties that we have been waiting for.”

The narrative oral history format was generally ignored until Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk was published more than a decade later. Since publishing our book in 1996, the oral history genre has exploded. In this essay we attempt to clarify the intuitive rules that we adhered to, in order to explain why the narrative oral history format is such a delicate beast—and how the format is compromised when these rules are breached.

I. C HOOSING A S UBJECT

Without incredible characters who can recount compelling stories you won’t have a book. Not only do the characters have to be willing to talk, but they also have to know each other (or at least know of one another), the more intimately, the better. People like to portray themselves in the best light possible and leave out any embarrassing moments, so it’s important to have other characters to cut to in order to add a healthy dose of reality.

It’s also imperative that the lives of your cast of characters eventually collide, and when they do, it’s essential to relate how a past event in the narrative changes or influences future incidents. In other words, everything in the narrative has to lead to the next event, like a raging locomotive, until the eventual conclusion.

Many oral histories don’t consider how crucial it is for its characters to interact, or the need for a distinctive person from chapter three to reappear later in chapter 37, which lends a grand, sweeping flow to the book.

The narrative oral history seems to work best when the main subject is involved in multiple stories and “secret histories.” In Edie these threads included: Andy Warhol and the Factory; the denizens of the infamous Chelsea Hotel; the pathos of the “average” blue blood family, as well as a portrait of life at Harvard University in the early 1960s. The reader also gets a rare glimpse into the underground music, film, and art scenes in New York; the rock & roll and fashion industries, America’s preeminent mental hospitals; as well as peeks at such obscure sects as the “A Set,” a group of quasi-criminal amphetamine addicts who inhabited the Lower East Side.

If some of your characters are already public figures, it’s crucial to interview all the lesser-known associates. Or, as Jean Stein put it: “Indeed, the freshest, most informative material seemed to come less from the public figures than from those for whom being interviewed must have been a novelty… It is their contributions, rather than the public figures, who are more reserved, less personal, and tend to the general rather than explicit, that shows this oral history technique at its best.”

Of course, since people remember events in a nonlinear way, muddied by the waters of time, there are bound to be direct contradictions from one subject to the next. Jean Stein found these differences daunting, stating, “The voices are sometimes disparate and contradictory, or repetitious, and prove difficult to link. If there are differences of opinion or fact, these cannot be explained editorially.”

In Please Kill Me, we utilized these direct contradictions, often placing one description of a specific event after the contrary entry above it, often with humorous results. We trusted the readers to make up their own minds about what was “true.” Jean Stein was right; differences of opinion cannot be explained editorially, but they can be clarified by the integrity of the different voices. If the contradicting subject is prone to making sweeping generalities, gets his facts wrong, or is always painting himself in a heroic light, it’s easy to discern who has told the specific contradicting event inaccurately.

Also remember the “tragic flaw” aspect to your characters, as the people who fucked up, i.e. went to jail, became drug addicts, or experienced some other terrible turn of events, make for much better reading and creates authentic drama, than people who lived “happily ever after.” The more varied your character’s behavior, the better, for the narrative oral history format is one of the best ways to show human beings at their most vulnerable, or heroic, or tragic—prerequisites for a successful book.

II. B E A WARE OF P LOTS AND S UBPLOTS

The prologue of Please Kill Me ends with a question by Lou Reed: “Will you die for the music?”

In other words, how far is the individual willing to take their anger, alienation and passion in creating his or her art? In the ensuing chapters, the question is answered by the individual character’s choices; some get sober and stop taking drugs—and lead ordinary lives—while others choose to drive the car off the cliff.

As important as it is for each chapter to have a tight narrative flow, the way the oral historian edits her chapters together is also crucial. Once the author or authors get their chapters completed, then they have the difficult task of editing the chapters together to complete the pastiche. Jean Stein describes the effect this way: “The technique used is occasionally almost the kaleidoscopic ‘flicker’ technique of films, in which a series of quick images of considerable variety provides an effect of wholeness. The success of such a technique obviously relies on the quality of the voices themselves . . .”

As always, it all comes down to the quality of voices.

Still, if you have a wealth of interviews to draw from that have been edited into complete chapters, weaving the plots and subplots together to read like a fast-paced novel can be a difficult, if not seemingly impossible task. It’s helpful to already have had some experience constructing a narrative flow, but not essential. The oral historian has to think, at times, of his book as a film, cutting in seemingly random events that will help move the narrative forward, but at the same time, these moments have to be as entertaining and informative as the most significant entries.

III. H ISTORY I S A LWAYS C AUSE AND E FFECT

It helped that many of our main characters in Please Kill Me tested their show business talents first in the “underground theater” scene before forming rock & roll bands. So we had to incorporate different aspects of this theater scene to explain how their excesses influenced the glitter rock scene of the early 70s, which eventually led to the creation of glam, which eventually led to punk rock. There is nothing as comparable to the reader as “experiencing” a character’s choices, rather than being told of them, and the narrative oral history provides the ultimate way to “feel” multiple characters’ emotions when executed correctly.

As Jean Stein put it more succinctly, “Editorial intervention is restricted solely to the placement of the material, so that there are no voices other than those of the interviewees.”

Therefore, the oral historian has to be aware of several factors while editing their chapters together: the fast-paced narrative flow, the emotions of the characters, the chronology of events, as well as the themes that will emerge out of the entirety of the project.

One word of advice: short chapters. You’d be amazed how much influence a five-page chapter can have on the overall narrative flow.

IV. I T’S N OT W RITING, I T’S C ARVING

The narrative oral history is such an incredible format because it draws from every art form: the chapters have the rhythm of song, the cuts are cinematic, newspaper headlines can punctuate incidents, slang is celebrated, and first-hand accounts bring the poetry of the spoken word. There’s not a single art form we can think of that is not included, from painting, weaving, even pictographs, for great art tells a great story.

Which leads us to that ultimate skill: sculpting. It’s as if the rough draft of the oral history is a huge block of marble. With each edit, it becomes defined and shaped. Constant cutting and chipping away finally reveals a masterpiece for the editing process proves true the old adage “less is more.”

Once the oral historian has a rough of the entire book in order, and is ready to read through the complete story—now comes the most compelling part. It’s time to cut out everything that is not absolutely essential.

Gillian McCain, who is somewhat of an anecdote hoarder, hates this part of the process, while Legs McNeil receives sadistic pleasure annihilating the turgid.

For the narrative oral history to work successfully there cannot be any fat on the bone. The oral historians may have collected amazing anecdotes, but, if these incidents do not move the story forward, or connect well established threads, they should not be included, no matter how sexy or alluring they may seem. A good rule of thumb for excising all the fat is, if you don’t miss it once it’s been cut, it wasn’t necessary. To emphasize this point, in Please Kill Me, we only used five to ten percent of the hundreds of interviews we conducted.

Like most of our suggestions, what to leave in and what to take out, is left to the oral historian’s intuition. Which is why we said it helps to have one of the authors experienced in creating a narrative, because the same skills used in telling a story are utilized in the narrative oral history format. These techniques, such as how to begin or end a chapter, are essential to the narrative oral history format. One editing technique, that we like to call the “Möbius Strip Approach,” is when the section begins on one specific topic and ends on a completely different one.

Examples of the “Möbius Strip Approach” can often be seen in The Simpsons. For example, one episode begins with Homer complaining about taking out the garbage (which sets up the “emptying the garbage” theme) but ends with him tripping on peyote with a coyote spirit guide, who talks to him in the voice of Johnny Cash. Every chapter has to include an unexpected joy or tragedy, no matter how seemingly insignificant. These twists keep the reader’s interest piqued, and from bogging down the narrative.

It is important to state here that it is almost mandatory for a successful narrative oral history to have two authors. Two sets of eyes are needed to catch each other’s mistakes and to inspire one another to go beyond what they think they are capable of.

It helps to do a serious “oral edit” of the manuscript, wherein the book is read out loud by a third party, while the oral historians are both free to listen and take notes. This “oral edit” process is important in any piece of writing, but especially crucial in creating a narrative oral history in order to hear the parts that aren’t working since there are so many voices involved. While constructing Please Kill Me, Gillian McCain concentrated on the integrity of the voices and developing the themes of the book, while Legs McNeil focused on the structure. Without one element being executed correctly, the others wouldn’t have mattered—for the structure would have fallen like the proverbial house of cards. Great structure is useless if the reader doubts the credibility of the narrator. And strong voices don’t mean squat if not presented in the most readable form possible. One oral historian cannot do all the chores necessary for a top-quality work at the same time. As Jean Stein put it, “The historian, working in a more usual way, can mold his source material to suit his purpose; he can remove discrepancies; when there are any gaps, he can conjecture; he can supply his own narrative and descriptions. On the other hand, the editor or historian working in oral narrative must allow the voices to speak for themselves.”  What Stein forgot to add was, that in the end, the final edit is the editorial voice of the narrative.

V. T HE I MPORTANCE OF S LANG, G RAMMAR, P UNCTUATION, AND THE I NTEGRITY OF THE V OICE

Many of the narrative oral histories that we have encountered clean up the speech patterns so that all of the voices sound alike. Our goal is exactly the opposite, to make each voice accurately reflect each unique speaker. As much as possible we strive to keep the interviewee’s speech pattern intact, not only because it makes the book more interesting and truthful, but because it tells so much about the person being interviewed, and in turn, gives us clues to how much we can count on them as reliable messengers of information.

Swearing is a necessity in the narrative oral history, as well as slang and incorrect grammar. The lack of swearing in the current oral histories we find not only shocking, but blasphemous to the genre. Even books that allow the ubiquitous “damn” are dishonest. One can tell from the emotion emanating behind the speakers words that “damn” just would not cut it. This is a prime example of how the narrative oral historian condescends to its reader and tells us more about the authors than the individual speaking in the book.

For example, in Please Kill Me, our most prolific cusser was Peter Jordan, a former substitute bass player for the New York Dolls. His swearing is so ubiquitous that it served as comic relief: “What happened to Johnny and Sable was that Johnny became a fucking totally fucking paranoid fucking speed freak.”

A sanitized version of this quote could never be as impactful as the original.

To construct narrative oral histories without profanity insults the readers’ intelligence. The oral historian’s job is to maintain the authenticity of the interviewee’s voice, not to judge the words being spoken. If the oral historians have any moral qualms about whether to censor the words in their transcripts, they should choose a new career.

The beauty of the oral history is that it captures the poetry of the spoken word, they way people actually speak — with all the slang and incorrect grammar intact. For without them, it is an inaccurate portrait of the person speaking. So many oral histories we have read are comprised of “clean text.” There is an absence of cussing, pausing, laughing, and modern day speech conventions. Most people use the words or phrases: “like,” “ya know,” or other idiosyncratic speech patterns that are unique to that individual. Without a fair representation of natural speech patterns, oral historians are doing themselves a great disservice and limiting the breadth of the work.

Sometimes an oral historian is given an amazing gift: a speaker who offers the rhythm of storytelling, detailed description, suspense, an arc, keen observations, perhaps a philosophical missive, poetry and very little editing. These are few and far between.

VI. S UGGESTIONS FOR I NTERVIEWING S UBJECTS

We have saved one of the most important aspects of creating a narrative oral history for last; the highly intuitive interviewing process, that has no set rules. It’s essential that the oral historian’s curiosity compel them to leave no question unanswered.

Suggestions for interviewing are the following: 1) don’t talk about yourself (unless asked) 2) maintain eye contact 3) begin with simple questions. The cost of audio recording is negligible and spending an hour to get the subject comfortable with the interviewer is sometimes essential before going on to ask the vital questions.

Usually, most interview subjects are happy to talk about their past, but sometimes, when dealing with indiscretions, the person being interviewed might not want to talk on the record. Tread lightly, but thoroughly. Approach all potential subjects with honesty and intelligence, and prove to them that you know the ins and outs of the story, and that their individual voices are essential in getting it right.

The oral historians must have as thorough an understanding of the events they are trying to chronicle as possible. Create a timeline of specific events in your story, so that you know those events backward and forward. This will help determine who you need to interview and what to ask.

In the end, though, it really comes down to intuition. Even though Edie and Please Kill Me made the narrative oral history popular for the next generation of writers, we still believe that the true value of this amazing genre has yet to be fully recognized.

The significance of the narrative oral history lies in that it takes documenting history out of the hands of the elite and places it in the voices of the people (and reach obsessive-compulsive writers). We believe that one day the narrative oral history will be a respected and accepted literary vehicle for chronicling histories that come alive in front of the reader’s eyes.

For that is the whole point.

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Harvard Library
Research Guides
Faculty of Arts & Sciences Libraries

Oral History Research

Handbooks and guides to oral history methodology, selected resources to make your own oral histories, participative resources and projects for oral history, harvard library research guides for oral history, oral history collections at harvard, oral history collections beyond harvard, scholarship & commentary on oral history methodology.

ArcGIS StoryMaps An engaging platform for presenting your oral histories.

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Oral History Interviews Recommendations for planning an oral history project and tips for conducting interviews

American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques Although folklorists tend to be more interested in documenting ways of living than history, per se, many of their methods are similar. This guide includes helpful advice for conducting fieldwork in folklore, including tips for planning, conducting, recording, and archiving interviews.

Indigenous Studies: Oral History Provides helpful information and resources to inform respectful understanding and citation of Indigenous oral histories.

Oral History Association: Principles and Best Practices An invaluable document for maintaining an ethical stance as a researcher, with guidance on archiving interviews and managing rights/copyright.

Oral History Methodology (Hajek A., 2014) The case study starts with a historical outline of the advent of oral history research in Western society, its strengths and its weaknesses, before it moves to a practical exploration of oral history methodology. It explains how to set up an oral history project, how to conduct interviews and what legal concerns to keep in mind. It also provides details on recording equipment and discusses a number of potential outputs of oral history data.

The Oral History Reader (edited by Perks, R. and Thomson, A., 2015) A comprehensive, international anthology combining major classic articles with cutting-edge pieces on the theory, method and use of oral history.

Webinar: Introduction to Oral History and Interviewing , Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia University

Library Support For Qualitative Research On the "Interview Research" page of this guide, see the "Conducting Interviews" , "Transcription" and "Data Analysis" sub-pages. There, you will find technical tools, tips, and assistance available at Harvard. Please note that these resources have been selected for a wide range of interviewing methodologies; thus, some may not apply to the oral history genre.

Beyond Harvard

The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University You will find here innovative approaches to oral history, some of which utilize various art forms.

Columbia Center for Oral History Research: Resources A helpful selection of resources for conducting oral history research.

Oral History guide from Coates Library, Trinity University Useful tips and resources compiled by Abna Schnur.

Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) Created by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, this tool allows producers of oral history to inexpensively and efficiently enhance access to oral history online. Because OHMS provides word-level search capability and a time-correlated transcript or indexed interview, the audience is connected from a search result to the corresponding moment in a recorded interview.

Library Support For Qualitative Research This Harvard Library guide has a useful section on interview research, much of which is relevant to oral history research.

Oral History and Interviews, Harvard Library Research Guide for History Compiled by Harvard Librarians, this guide offers strategies for locating oral history interviews, as well as a list of relevant databases and collections.

Oral Histories at Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Get started with archival research on women's oral histories with this guide.

Freshman Seminar 64 E Asian American Literature The "Oral History" section of this guide lists several oral history resources relevant to researching the Asian American experience in the 1960s.

Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Digital Collection: Interviews and Manuals, 1950-1953 (inclusive) Named the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (also known as the Harvard Refugee Interview Project), this was a large scale, unclassified project, based largely on interviews with Soviet émigrés in West Germany, Austria, and the United States, aimed at gaining new insights into strategic psychological and sociological aspects of the Soviet social system.

Woodberry Poetry Room Oral History Initiative Check out video recordings on YouTube of this 2021 series of oral histories on pioneering Boston women poets. Tip: Look for "ORAL HISTORY INITIATIVE" in the title.

Find More at Harvard

You may search for interviews and oral histories (whether in textual or audiovisual formats) held in archival collections at Harvard Library. HOLLIS searches all documented collections at Harvard, whereas HOLLIS for Archival Discovery searches only those with finding aids. Although HOLLIS for Archival Discovery covers less material, you may find it easier to parse your search results, especially when you wish to view results at the item level (within collections). Try these approaches:

Search in HOLLIS:

To retrieve items available online, do an Advanced Search for interview* OR "oral histor*" (in Subject), with Resource Type "Archives/Manuscripts," then refine your search by selecting "Online" under "Show Only" on the right of your initial result list. Revise the search above by adding your topic in the Keywords or Subject field (for example: African Americans ) and resubmitting the search.
To enlarge your results set, you may also leave out the "Online" refinement; if you'd like to limit your search to a specific repository, try the technique of searching for Code: Library + Collection on the "Advanced Search" page .

Search in HOLLIS for Archival Discovery:

To retrieve items available online, search for interview* OR "oral histor*" limited to digital materials . Revise the search above by adding your topic (for example: artist* ) in the second search box (if you don't see the box, click +).
To preview results by collection, search for interview* OR "oral histor*" limited to collections . Revise the search above by adding your topic (for example: artist* ) in the second search box (if you don't see the box, click +). Although this method does not allow you to isolate digitized content, you may find the refinement options on the right side of the screen (refine by repository, subject or names) helpful. Once your select a given collection, you may search within it (e.g., for your topic or the term interview).

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) To find oral histories among the millions of materials from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions across the United States, search for "oral history," and then use the subject and other refinements to discover oral histories of interest to you.

The HistoryMakers Contains interviews African Americans who have made a significant contribution in area of American life or culture, or who has been associated with a particular movement or organization that is important in the African American community. Disciplines include Art, Business, Civics, Education, Entertainment, Law, Media, Medicine, Military, Music, Politics, Religion, Science, Sports and Style. Harvard constituents have full access to this database when connecting via Harvard.

Library of Congress Digital Collections The Library of Congress provides several oral history collections online. To locate them, search the Digital Collections site for "oral history".

Oral History Centers and Collections Curated by members of the H-OralHist Network.

Oral History Online An index to worldwide oral history collections, with links to interview-level bibliographic records in English and to full-text materials, audio files and visual files where these are available.

Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage Collections More than 80,000 historical and contemporary items from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage's Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections are available in the Smithsonian’s Collections Search Center . Find complete collection descriptions in finding aids and inventories in the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archive , which often include digital surrogates.

South Asian Oral History Project The SAOHP has been conducted in four phases. Each phase is marked by key historical events that drew South Asians to the United States: 1) 1950s Immigrants, 2) 1960s and 1970s Immigrants, 3) 1980s Immigrants, 4) South Asian classical performing artists (vocalists, instrumentalists and dancers) in the Pacific Northwest. The transcriptions and audio recordings from phase one and the transcription and audio/video recordings from phase two through four are available digitally.

1947 Partition Archive The 1947 Partition Archive, "The Archive" has been preserving oral histories of Partition witnesses since 2010 through a combined program that includes an innovative technique for crowdsourcing by Citizen Historians, as well as collection by trained scholars. Nearly 10,000 oral histories have been preserved on digital video, making The Archive the largest documentation effort focused on Partition. Oral histories have been recorded from 500+ cities in 15 countries across the world. See information about accessing the archive materials .

Statue of Liberty Oral History Project: A Record of Living Memory One of the world’s largest and most diverse chronicles of the American immigrant experience, this resource includes interviews from passengers, families, immigration officials, military personnel, detainees, and former Ellis Island employees. It is available to researchers, students, educators, and the general public.

The Tretter Transgender Oral History Project A growing collection of oral histories of gender transgression, broadly understood through a trans framework.

Visual History Archive (VHA), USC Shoah Foundation Created by the Shoah Foundation, this fully indexed and searchable digital repository contains the visual testimony of approximately 55,000 survivors of genocidal wars. The majority of the testimonies are from Holocaust survivors (1939-1945) but the archive also includes survivor testimony from the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994), the Armenian Genocide (1915-23) the Cambodian Genocide, the Guatemalan Genocide (1978-96) and the Nanjing Massacre (1937), among others. For more information about the testimonies, visit the VHA guide . Harvard constituents have full access to this repository when connecting via Harvard.

Ways of Knowing Oral History Collection This project documents the stories of individuals who have developed and implemented alternative library classification schemes or controlled vocabularies. These projects describe how institutional descriptive practices facilitate some ways of knowing and not others and demonstrate that such practices can change.

Belfast to Boston: Oral History Goes Awry WNYC Studios' "The Takeaway" speaks with Boston Globe columnist, Kevin Cullen, about how Boston College's well meaning attempt to promote truth and reconciliation around the Troubles backfired on the ground in Belfast.

Blee, K. (1993). Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan. The Journal of American History, 80(2), 596-606. doi:10.2307/2079873 Critically examines issues that arise in oral history methodology around the life stories of ordinary people whose political agendas are unsavory, dangerous, or deliberately deceptive.

Davis, M., & Kennedy, E. (1986). Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960. Feminist Studies, 12 (1), 7-26. doi:10.2307/3177981 This article explores the role of sexuality in the cultural and political development of the Buffalo lesbian community.

Portelli, Alessandro. (2010). The death of Luigi Trastulli. Memory and event - memory and fact. Anuarul Institutului De Istorie Orală : AIO, 12, 245-274. Luigi Trastulli, a young steel worker in Terni, Italy, died in an altercation with police in 1949, when workers left the factory to protest against a North-Atlantic Treaty signed by the Italian Government. The strike, confrontation and assassination greatly impacted the identity and culture of Terni. This essay discusses how the event has been portrayed and interpreted over the years in both official and oral sources. The essay linked above is in Italian. For an English language translation, see The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories.

Portelli, Alessandro (2016). What makes oral history different. In Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson, The Oral History Reader, Routledge, p. 68-78. Publisher abstract: "There seems to be a fear that once the floodgates of orality are opened, writing (and rationality along with it) will be swept out as if by a spontaneous uncontrollable mass of fluid, amorphous material. But this attitude blinds us to the fact that our awe of writing has distorted our perception of language and communication to the point where we no longer understand either orality or the nature of writing itself. As a matter of fact, written and oral sources are not mutually exclusive. They have common as well as autonomous characteristics, and specific functions which only either one can fill (or which one set of sources fills better than the other). Therefore, they require different specific interpretative instruments. But the undervaluing and the overvaluing of oral sources end up by cancelling out specific qualities, turning these sources either into mere supports for traditional written sources, or into an illusory cure for all ills. This chapter will attempt to suggest some of the ways in which oral history is intrinsically different, and therefore specifically useful."

Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which allows anyone to share and adapt our material as long as proper attribution is given. For details and exceptions, see the Harvard Library Copyright Policy ©2021 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Finding the right equipment for a project can be one of the most difficult steps. Our digital expert, Doug Boyd, makes it easy by providing you with Ask Doug, a set of questions that takes you …

Getting Started

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The special issue, guest edited by Doug Boyd , contains 14 articles that cover issues of collecting, curating, and disseminating oral history as well as a number of case studies. Of the 14 articles, 6 are free to access online. Go to the The Oral History Review online to find out more ( http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/current) .

Editor’s introduction Doug Boyd Guest Editor’s Introduction Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): i-iii doi:10.1093/ohr/oht038

Peter B. Kaufman Oral History in the Video Age Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 1-7 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht033 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/1.full

Anne Valk and Holly Ewald Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 8-24 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht019

Mark Tebeau Listening to the City: Oral History and Place in the Digital Era Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 25-35 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht037

Mary Larson Steering Clear of the Rocks: A Look at the Current State of Oral History Ethics in the Digital Age Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 36-49 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht028

Timothy Lloyd The Civil Rights Oral History Survey Project Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 50-53 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht015 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/50.full

Nancy Groce and Bertram Lyons Designing a National Online Oral History Collecting Initiative: The Occupational Folklore Project at the American Folklife Center Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 54-66 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht018 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/54.full

Brad Rakerd On Making Oral Histories More Accessible to Persons with Hearing Loss Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 67-74 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht022 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/67.full

Brooke Bryan A Closer Look at Community Partnerships Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 75-82 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht023 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/75.full

Dean Rehberger Getting Oral History Online: Collections Management Applications Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 83-94 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht025

Doug Boyd OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 95-106 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht031 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/95.full

Robert E. Warren, Michael P. Maniscalco, Erich K. Schroeder, James S. Oliver, Sue Huitt, Douglas Lambert, and Michael Frisch Restoring the Human Voice to Oral History: The Audio-Video Barn Website Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 107-125 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht032

Lindsey Barnes and Kim Guise World War Words: The Creation of a World War II–Specific Vocabulary for the Oral History Collection at The National WWII Museum Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 126-134 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht027 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/content/40/1/126.full

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 (2013) 40(1): 135-153 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht035

Steve Cohen Shifting Questions: New Paradigms for Oral History in a Digital World Oral History Review (2013) 40(1): 154-167 doi:10.1093/ohr/oht036

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Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2013/06/the-oral-history-review/

Welcome to Oral History in the Digital Age where we will connect you to the latest information on digital technologies pertaining to all phases of the oral history process. There are two primary locations for the OHDA Project online, the primary site and the OHDA WIKI . You are currently on the primary site where you have access to essays written by leading experts about recording, archiving and disseminating your oral history projects and you can view video interviews from our series Thinking Big which features conversations with many of these leading experts. The wiki links you to current best practices from around the web and includes many exemplary web sites which offer numerous examples for diverse and exciting ways to present oral history online.

If you are just getting started, you have come to the right place. Go to Getting Started to find easy to follow “playlists” that will help you to start a project, improve your video techniques, and much more. Or you can browse the micro-essays that address a number of issues about collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories. Or view the video interviews with noted experts. Or stop in and Ask Doug to find the best equipment for your project.

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/oral-history-in-the-digital-age/

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/project-overview/

The Thinking Big video series captures several leading voices on digital oral history and digital media. Learn more about the production of the Thinking Big series here at About Thinking Big.

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/thinking-big-video-series/

Written by some of the most noted experts in the field, the following essays and case studies are designed to give you the latest information on best practices in collecting , curating , and disseminating oral histories. As micro-essays and case studies, the texts are designed to be easily updated and revised as technologies change. You are invited to leave your comments or turn to our OHDA Wiki to leave your own updates and perspectives on the issues raised. Find out more about the authors.

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/essays/

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/best-practices/

Don’t know where to start? Go to Getting Started to find easy to follow “playlists” that will help you to start a project, improve your video techniques, and much more. Or you can browse the micro-essays that address a number of issues about collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories. Or view the video interviews with noted experts. Or stop in and Ask Doug to find the best equipment for your project.

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/getting-started/

Filed under Collecting , Featured , Recording , Technical

Finding the right equipment for a project can be one of the most difficult steps. Our digital expert, Doug Boyd, makes it easy by providing you with Ask Doug , a set of questions that takes you through a series of decisions to some of the best possible choices for your particular needs.

At this point, we have information about buying your next digital recorder. Doug supplies you with up-to-date information about the latest recorders, gives you his thoughts, and picks some of his favorites. If you are new to digital recorders, you may want to see our videos on digital recorders or read our essay on What You Should Know about Digital Recorders. We also have a handy index of those pesky technical terms broken down into plain english.

ask doug , audio , digital , doug boyd , recorder

Permanent link to this article: https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/ask-doug-choosing-a-digital-audio-recorder/

Don't know where to start. Go to Getting Started to find easy to follow " playlists " that will help you to start a project, improve your video techniques, and much more. Or you can browse the micro-essays that address a number of issues about collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories. Or view the video interviews with noted experts. Or stop in and Ask Doug to find the best equipment for your project.

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The Places of OHDA

OHDA Primary Site : The OHDA site includes all of the materials (text, audio, video) on best practices for oral history digital video.

OHDA WIKI : The WIKI links you to best practices from around the web and includes many exemplary web sites.

OHDA Project Information : This project site describes the original project and has reports, participants, and original grant proposal.

American Folklore Society
Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University
American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress
Michigan State University Museum
Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History University of Kentucky Libraries
Michigan State University
Oral History Association
February 2017
October 2015
November 2014
August 2012
November 2011

In this section:

Oral history in the digital age.

OHDA Essays

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Oral History in the Digital Age ( https://ohda.matrix.msu.edu ) connects you to the latest information on digital technologies pertaining to all phases of the oral history process.

Browse the current essays about collecting, curating and disseminating oral history in the digital age.

For more information on the development and organization of the project, please visit the OHDA Project Site . This resource a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership project and a collaboration among the Michigan State University Digital Humanities Center, Matrix ; the American Folklife Center (AFC/LOC), the Library of Congress; the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH); the American Folklore Society (AFS); the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History , University of Kentucky Libraries; and the Oral History Association.

The project and site was developed under the intellectual leadership of Doug Boyd Director, the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries; Steve Cohen, Research Faculty, Michigan State University Digital Humanities Center, Matrix; Brad Rakerd, Professor, Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders; C. Kurt Dewhurst, Professor, Director of Arts and Cultural Initiatives, and Senior Fellow for University Outreach & Engagement, Michigan State University; and Dean Rehberger, Director, Matrix.

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Why Oral History?

Open Access
First Online: 24 November 2016

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Julianne Nyhan 12 &
Andrew Flinn 12

Part of the book series: Springer Series on Cultural Computing ((SSCC))

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This chapter begins with an overview of the histories of oral history and its use within different branches of academic and public history. Focussing next on the study of communities, it briefly explores the contested, fuzzy and fluid meaning of the term ‘community’ before examining the application of oral history to community histories, including academic and professional communities. It discusses some of the ethical challenges at stake in this type of historical research, including the multifaceted relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, and the choice of which ‘significant’ lives are privileged to tell the story of the community (and therefore which significant lives and perspectives might be missing). Before outlining some of the issues surfaced by using oral history to document foundational stories of DH as a discipline, this chapter looks briefly at the use of oral history in some other analogous professional and academic settings. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on the suitability of oral history in telling these community stories by asking who owns these histories and how that ownership is manifested.

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Oral History
Community History
Collective Narrative
Foundation Story

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction

The novelist David Lodge has defined history as ‘the verdict of those who weren’t there on those who were’. In the best dynamic of an interview, interviewees reverse the equation, trying to explain to those of us who weren’t there how things really were. (Ritchie 2014 , p. 56) And the very act of the oral histories, in their long, slow, unfolding and the different qualities (long interviews, minimal interruption) enacts a different pattern of communication and exchange. (Colton and Ward 2005 , p. 106)

There are many starting points to consider and questions the historian must ask when seeking to piece together the history of a community. The historian must make choices about what is his or her relationship to these histories, how these histories are to be written, what sources are to be used and to what purpose. These choices have a more profound impact on how the histories are produced than historians often like to acknowledge. This chapter will examine the nature of oral history and its suitability for recovering the histories of the use of computers and associated technologies in the Humanities, the emergence of DH as a recognised academic discipline and the development of Digital Humanists as an academic community. History is more than an account of the past ‘as it happened’ – the past is remembered, understood and interpreted by a number of different actors including participants, witnesses and historians. Oral history does not shy away from these differences and multiple interpretations; rather, it allows the various memories and understandings to be explored and examined in detail. This chapter (and book) argues that such an approach is appropriate and even essential to charting the often disputed and disputatious histories of the establishment of new disciplines and the development of academic and professional communities.

In demonstrating this worth, this chapter will begin with an overview of the histories of oral history and its use within different branches of academic and public history. Oral history has not been without its opponents. Criticisms of oral history approaches have included the identification of potential biases, the reliance on memory and its reliability/unreliability, and the validity of individual accounts of the past, real or socially constructed. Oral historians have responded to these criticisms both by seeking to demonstrate how oral history can be subjected to the same checks and balances as other forms of historical analysis but also, and more importantly, by arguing that some of the supposed weaknesses or ‘peculiarities’ of oral history are not limitations at all. Instead the differing personal narratives and varying memories offer unrivalled opportunities to explore and understand communities and their relationship to the past; something that would simply not be possible when relying on other more traditional text-based historical sources. As suggested by the quotations which introduce this chapter, oral history can be the basis for a different type of history, more dynamic, more direct and sometimes confrontational, dependent on the relationship between the interviewer, the interviewee and the past, but creating a space where in Portelli’s words ( 1997 , p. viii) history is made to listen and take account of (but not necessarily accept uncritically) the perspectives of those who were there.

Focussing next on the study of communities, this chapter will briefly explore the contested, fuzzy and fluid meaning of the term ‘community’ before examining the application of oral history to community histories, including academic and professional communities. The chapter will discuss some of the ethical challenges at stake in this type of historical research, including the multifaceted relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, and the choice of which ‘significant’ lives are privilege to tell the story of the community (and therefore which significant lives and perspectives might be missing). Before outlining some of the issues surfaced by using oral history to document foundational stories of DH as a discipline, this chapter will look briefly at the use of oral history in some other analogous professional and academic settings. As discussed in the previous chapter, although there has been 70 or more years of using the computer and associated technologies in Humanities research inside and outside the academy, the story of that interaction has not yet been written in a comprehensive and rigorous fashion. This chapter makes the case that in these circumstances, when the histories have yet to be written, when many of the protagonists are still alive, and when the subject of those histories is memory, motivation, innovation and origins, that oral history is the perfect tool for documenting those histories, enabling those who were there to ‘speak to history’ and to those who were not there. Of course, history, meaning making and historical interpretation does not stop at this point. For Portelli ( 2013 , p. 284) ‘good oral history…does not end with the turning off of the recorder, with the archiving of the document, or with the writing of the book’, for the interviews that is just the beginning of their lives as sources for future research. The interviews are merely one source, one version of many versions which over the years can be revisited, tested against other sources, interpreted and reinterpreted. The presentation of the interviews in this book (and on the corresponding website) reflects this approach. These first-hand accounts represent a first draft of history, vital and dynamic, drawing on the accounts of key participants, but not yet the definitive, final history.

In employing oral history techniques to examine the use of the computer in Humanities research and DH’s transition from the margins towards the academic mainstream, we have sought to critically investigate shared as well as divergent foundational narratives; the significance of certain individuals as innovators, revolutionaries and boundary crossers and the personal difficulties, resistance and criticisms they faced; the discussions as to the nature of discipline; and the extent to which DH was and is as inclusive, transformatory and collaborative as is claimed and whether, for instance, it has really been able to transcend barriers around gender within the academy.

In conclusion the chapter will reflect on the suitability of oral history in telling these community stories by asking who owns these histories and how that ownership is manifested. It is impossible not to draw parallels between DH and oral history. The similarity lies not only in the relationship to technology and its transformatory role but also in a shared rhetoric which stresses notions of radical challenge to existing scholarly approaches, a commitment to participatory and collaborative practice, and an interdisciplinary approach which operates inside and outside the academy (Boyd and Larson 2014 , p. 10–13). In the 1970s, Paul Thompson wrote in his seminal account The Voice of the Past of the potential of oral history to transform both the ‘content and purpose of history’ in that ‘it can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place’ ( 2000 , p. 3). In considering this, oral historians ask themselves whether their interviews tell us about what happened in the past, or whether they make sense of the past and subsequent lives from the vantage point of the present, and to what extent historians and researchers wish or are able to leave these interpretations in the hands of protagonists.

A Brief History of Modern Oral History

The origins of modern oral history are often traced back to the programme initiated by the North American journalist and oral historian Allen Nevins at Columbia University in 1948. Nevins’ conception of oral history was in essence an archival one, aiming to record for posterity and the use of others the thoughts and memories of leading politicians, judges and businessmen, ‘living Americans who have led significant lives’ (Nevins quoted in Sharpless 2007 , p. 11). According to Nevins ( 1996 , p. 37) interviews should be forensic and challenging encounters carried out by ‘an earnest, courageous interviewer who has mastered a background of facts and who has the nerve to press his scalpel tactfully and with some knowledge of psychology into delicate tissues and even bleeding wounds’. Although the power dynamics involved in such elite interviewing mean that is unlikely that all these interviews were as testing as Nevins advocated, the characterisation of the interview as a rigorous examination was a vital if not always attainable element of this type of oral history practice. Programmes established at other US universities and at the Presidential libraries followed a similar pattern of elite subject interviews for archives and use by future researchers.

This early emphasis on such ‘elite’ histories draws attention to a fault line which runs though many subsequent divergences in oral history over how ‘significance’ in the lives of interviewees was to be determined and where in society this ‘significance’ was to be located. Of course, not all oral history interviews focused on the elites. In the United States the practice of capturing the voices and life stories of the less famous and less powerful associated with the approaches of the Chicago School of Urban Sociology and the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project in the first half of the twentieth century influenced the development of a more populist form of oral history alongside the recording of the memories of the ‘movers and shakers’ in society (Grele 1996 , p. 64–65). In the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe (Scandinavia in particular) oral history grew in the 1960s and 1970s from its roots in local history and folklorist studies into a practice predominantly adopted by politically engaged historians associated with new social histories, labour history, the women’s movement and other civil rights movements, seeking to challenge existing dominant historical narratives and ‘recover’ hidden histories. Rather than elite or expert witness histories which were so prevalent in the US, the dominant approach to oral history in the UK (and reflected in the conference and journal of the Oral History Society) was one associated with histories from below, of the underpowered as opposed to the powerful, the periphery rather than the centre and of popular ‘community’ oral histories (Smith 2014 ). Ken Plummer ( 2001 , p. 29) arguing for the return of human agency to social science research (‘critical humanism’) via the use of life stories and narrative approaches to research memorably likened oral history to ‘a global, fragmented social movement hell bent on tracking, retrieving, recording and archiving the multiple worlds of our recent past’ that might otherwise be lost.

Like many advocates for DH, oral historians have claimed that the practice of oral history could result in more democratic and transformational scholarship and histories. Reflecting the strength of this strand of oral history, Paul Thompson wrote in the preface to the first edition of The Voice of the Past ( 2000 , p. vi) that ‘the richest possibilities for oral history lie within the development of a more socially conscious and democratic history’. In contrast to the US, this appears to have been the dominant perspective in the UK and Europe. With the exception of academic studies of high politics, sponsored history projects instigated to celebrate institutional anniversaries and the National Life Story (NLS) projects at the British Library, much of UK oral history practice followed Thompson’s model and perhaps lacked some of the variety and heterogeneity of the US practice (Perks 2010a , b ). The best of these sought to merge both approaches, interviewing individuals from all walks of life within a framework of rigorous and critical questioning.

Some projects have aimed to study professional and academic communities. Since 1987 NLS ( http://www.bl.uk/projects/national-life-stories ) has obtained external funding for the collecting of life histories of people working in various occupations such architects, writers, lawyers, as well as of those working at all levels in the steel, electricity, oil, water and food industries, in the City, and the post office in addition to specific firms such as Tesco and Barings ( http://www.bl.uk/projects/national-life-stories ). Although NLS has not yet completed a study of an academic community, the large and significant Oral History of British Science (2009–2013) captured the lives of those working in science at every level and in universities, in government research centres and in commercial environments ( http://www.bl.uk/voices-of-science ). Other UK collections at the British Library and elsewhere which document similar communities of practice to DH practitioners include oral histories of universities and specific departments (the Open University, Oxford University, Manchester University, the Science Studies Unit at Edinburgh, British Antarctic Survey and the British Rocketry Oral History Programme), academic and professional fields (computing pioneers), professional groups (general practitioners, geriatricians, nurses, police officers, meteorologists, archivists and museum curators), Royal Colleges and Societies (Arts, Chemistry), and campaigners (medical and political activists) in addition to the long-running oral history witness seminar programme directed by Michael Kandiah at the Institute of Contemporary British History. More such oral histories, including those sponsored by academic and professional associations or membership bodies, may exist or at least have been created in the near past but they have left very little trace (Perks 2010b , p. 219). One also wonders how many of them got much further and deeper than the celebratory and the anecdotal, and attempted the more rigorous examination advocated by Nevins.

As suggested earlier, we are consistently struck by the extent to which the experience of oral historians mirrors that of Digital Humanists. Fittingly, in the context of our study of the application of computer technologies to Humanities research, the development and growth of oral history itself is closely identified with changes and developments in technology. There is a pleasing irony that in seeking to better understand the dynamics of the application of computers to Humanities research and the growth of DH, we have chosen oral history, an approach that has been in the past, and is now again in the process of being fundamentally changed, perhaps even transformed by technology. Modern oral history developed as recording devices capable of making high quality audio recordings became easier to transport and to use (from portable reel to reel and tape cassette recorders to the mobile solid-state digital recording devices of today) and available at prices that were not prohibitive. The production of the cassette tape recorder was critical to the expansion of oral history practice in the 1960s and 1970s. The ease of achieving high quality digital recordings has been equally significant in terms of the recording process and the possibilities for dissemination and use since 2000 (Perks 2011 ; Thomson 2006 ).

For some commentators, web based access to digital (and digitised) oral histories offers the opportunity to stress the essential orality of oral history, freeing it from the tyranny of the transcript, emphasising the potentialities of aural rather than textual access to oral histories, and replacing some of the mediation (‘intervention, selection, shaping, arrangement, and even manipulation’) required to produce the documentary representation of the audio with a post-documentary sensibility (Frisch 2006 , p. 110). There is no doubt that in the past the transcript (as in this volume) has been essential in unlocking the potential for use of oral history materials but digital formats, software developments and web based access to oral history materials do offer the opportunity to fundamentally reduce or even reverse the reliance on the transcript (Boyd and Larson 2014 , p. 7–10). Others have suggested, however, that perhaps the distinctions between the transcript and the voice can be over-stated and if the social benefits of opening up the great wealth of oral history materials to the users of web are to be realised then a better understanding of how different people and cultures engage on an emotional level with audio materials, particularly voices, is required so that people accessing digital oral histories can be encouraged to listen carefully and deeply (Cohen 2013 ).

Challenges to Oral History: Valuing Difference

As the interviews in this volume illustrate, Digital Humanists often thought of themselves as ‘explorers’ and ‘revolutionaries’ who were upsetting and transforming traditional Humanities scholarship. Oral historians in the 1970s and 1980s expressed similar claims that their approach would open up new areas of historical study and would transform (make ‘more democratic’) the practice of scholarship and knowledge production itself (Thompson 2000 , p. 8–9). Of course, again like the advocates of technology in the Humanities, oral history and its pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s were subjected to criticisms and condescension, especially in traditional academic circles. Beyond the primarily politically motivated criticism aimed at the focus and progressive purpose of much oral history, concerns were most frequently expressed over the reliability of the material collected by oral history interviews for use in historical research and the standard of the scholarship that the use of such material resulted in. Some critics argued that oral history resulted in the collection of trivia and others that it threatened to cause the study of history to become little more than the study of myths (Abrams 2010 , p. 5–6). If oral history aimed to recover ‘the past as it was’, questions were asked as to whether the testimonies based upon retrospective memories of events (as opposed to documentary records produced contemporaneously and then authenticated and analysed through a professionally recognised method of ‘objective’ historical scholarship) could be relied on to be accurate. It was asked whether oral histories were not fatally compromised by the biases and uncertainties introduced by the interview process; and in the case of collective, community-focussed projects whether the selection of interviewees would introduce an unrepresentative or overly homogeneous data collection sample into the studies.

Some oral historians countered these arguments by seeking to demonstrate the validity of oral testimony by subjecting it to rigorous cross-checking with other sources, arguing for the general accuracy of memory and its suitability as a source for historical evidence, importing methodologies from sociology and other social sciences regarding the selection and sampling of interviewees to ensure ‘representativeness’, and seeking to reduce the suggestion of bias introduced by the interviewer by developing neutral questions and replicable interview schedules (Abrams 2010 , p. 5; Shopes 2014 , p. 258–259). In arguing for the recognition of the partial and constructed nature of all historical sources (including archival records) and the reliability of oral testimony when so tested, oral historians sought to make the case that oral history interviews could be just as trustworthy as any other traditionally valued source when subjected to proper rigorous scholarly analysis and cross-checking in writing histories of the ‘past as it was’ (Thompson 2000 , p. 50 & 272–274).

However, from the late 1970s some oral historians, themselves critics of populist oral history approaches and the possibility of recovering the ‘past as it really was’, began to suggest something more radical in advancing an oral history practice which rather than seeking to account for unreliability and contingency began instead to identify subjectivity, orality and memory as critical elements of oral history as a historical source (Abrams 2010 , p. 6). Michael Frisch ( 1979 ) cautioned against both the ‘more history’ approach (merely submitting oral testimony to historical analysis just like other sources) and the ‘no history’ approach of more populist approaches which saw authenticity and truth in every testimony rendering historical analysis and scholarship redundant. Luisa Passerini ( 1979 , p. 84) influentially argued against the transformation of ‘the writing of history into a form of populism – that is to replace certain of the central tenets of scholarship with facile democratisation, and an open mind to demagogy.’ Both argued instead that the real critical value and strength of oral history was in its difference, not in seeking to describe the past ‘as it really was’ (‘mere reconstruction’) but in being able to open up completely different areas of historical research such as representations of culture, not just through ‘literal narrations but also the dimensions of memory, ideology and subconscious desires’. Passerini’s ( 1979 , p. 104) interest in critical consciousness and how that is expressed, finds expression through the examination of oral testimony and its inconsistencies not as an unreliable source but rather a unique window on subjectivity and the inter-connection and interaction between socialised attitudes and representations, and personal self-reflection and consciousness.

In what Thomson ( 2006 , p. 53) refers to as the second paradigm transformation in oral history (‘post-positivist approaches to memory and subjectivity’), rather than being a source of unreliability and lack of credibility, over the last 30 years oral historians have identified in the dialogic nature and inter-subjectivities of the interview, in the inconsistencies of memory and in the performance of the interview not weaknesses but strengths. This is what Alessandro Portelli ( 1981 , p. 99–100) described as ‘the peculiarities of oral history’ revealing ‘not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’. In particular from this perspective the inconsistencies and failures of memory become less a problem and instead the key to understanding how individuals make sense of the past in the present, and how their personal experiences and memories are constructed via the intersection and interaction with society, culture and ideology. In the context of applying oral history to the history of an emergent academic community and discipline, what oral history allows for is not just the description of individual lives working within DH but also the extent to which individuals use shared narratives to make sense of the past and their journey to the present, when these individual and collective narratives depart from each other or from what is known from other sources, and when collective narratives and memories contradict individual understanding. Questions we have explored in the interviews included here such as influences and early developments, the significance of building community, and the experience of hostility from other Humanities scholars offer an insight into individual experiences and meaning-making but also in the intra-community and cross-generational exchanges between interviewee and interviewer a strong sense of how the community understands its own memories and narratives.

Another recent criticism of oral history, its utility as an archival resource for re-use, is a subject which is of interest to all Humanities (and other) scholars who wish to use digital archives of research data for their own research. Following the ‘archival turn’ in their disciplines, Sociologists and other social science researchers have debated the extent to which other researchers’ archived data can be useful in subsequent, possibly unrelated, research projects (Geiger et al. 2010 ). Unlike much social science qualitative interviewing, for instance, oral history is often archival in its nature and intention. Interviews are initially undertaken for an immediate research purpose but the recording is also being created with the aim of archiving it and making it available to others in the future. The concerns of sociologists and other social scientists over the reliability of archived qualitative data (particularly qualitative interviews) in terms of the difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of fully knowing the context and the relationship/s which frame the interview, have been extended to the consideration of oral history. The re-use of archived oral histories can throw up challenges to researchers, especially regarding issues of informed and valid consent for such use and the interpretation that is placed on those recordings. However for many, including the authors of this book, the depth and richness of historical data that would otherwise be lost makes it inconceivable not to consider utilising the archive while emphasising the importance of fully documenting and making visible to future researchers the context of the interview (Geiger et al. 2010 ; Bornat 2005 ).

With such issues in mind, in the abstract that precedes each interview we have specified the immediate context of the interview in terms of when, where and how it was conducted. Some interviewees asked for and were given the ‘core questions’ in advance; some did not and so answered in a more extemporaneous fashion. It is mentioned in the preamble if interviewees were given the core questions in advance of the interview. Other important contextual aspects, such as the relationship that developed between the interviewer and interviewee during the course of the interview require a level of analysis that is not feasible to provide here (as Grele wrote, such interactions ‘require … analysis of the social and psychological kind’ (cited in Yow 2006 p.56)). Yet, the reader will detect various differences between the interviews that arose, at least in part, through the interplay of the many contextual factors that converged upon each interview. These range from practical issues, such as the interviewer’s ever developing expertise in and comfort with the technique of oral history interviewing to the quality of the rapport that did or did not develop between interviewee and interviewer. Notwithstanding the wealth of recollections contained in the transcripts, a few interviews did intermittently display more of conversational quality than was perhaps desirable. Equally, a few interviews seem to occasionally suffer the lack of it. Relevant to such dynamics is the fact that the interviews included here are intra-community interviews that were conducted between peers. We discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of such ‘insider interviewing’ further below. Here, suffice it to say that in the transcripts we have done our utmost to preserve such contextual markers not only with future researchers in mind but also because they are important signals of the time, space and dynamic contexts that each interview unfolded in.

Studying Communities

As has been discussed, since its post-1945 origins, modern oral history’s suitability for exploring and capturing lives of significance has been recognized. In contrast, community oral history, the dominant form of popular oral history practice over the last 30–40 years, has tended to look for and locate significance outside the elite sections of society typical of more conventional oral history (Thomson 2008 ). Although some community histories tend to be uncritical towards their subjects, this is by no means inevitable. Communities, whether defined by place, identity, interest, heritage, occupation, practice or some combination thereof can be well suited to a rigorous and productive application of oral history practice. A community or collective focus allows the interviewer to explore how and why individual and collective memories interact and to uncover what tacit knowledge underpins the community and is understood but frequently unacknowledged by members. It also allows the interviewer to explore how individuals and their communities share identities and histories which bind and include as well as construct identities and memories which restrict entry and exclude. The term ‘community’ is a notoriously vague and slippery word. While it is generally understood to have ‘warm’, positive connotations, when it is associated with marginalized and under-powered groups within society it can function as a device for ‘othering’ and further marginalization, or for overlooking or dismissing important differences and power relationships within social groups or communities (Shopes 2006 ; Waterton and Smith 2010 ; Kogan 2000 ).

Of course there is no reason why oral history could and should not be used to examine elite and professional communities. Although in the UK, at least, rigorous academic oral histories of elite communities as opposed to the more common celebratory, anniversary history projects, have been comparatively rare, in the US such studies have always represented a significant strand of oral history practice. Business organizations and scientific or academic communities have frequently sponsored oral history projects, sometimes out of vanity, but more significantly to raise profile around an event or anniversary or to capture valuable corporate or disciplinary knowledge that might otherwise be lost (Perks 2010a ). In a 2003 review of oral history projects of American science, Ronald Doel outlined the breadth of projects which represented thousands of interviews documenting, in rich and multifaceted ways, the development of different scientific communities inside and outside the universities (Doel 2003 , p. 350). The varied approaches taken by these oral history projects over the years reflected important developments in oral history thinking and practice. They moved from a more limited approach (asking very focused questions, of a few key individuals, about very specific occupational and disciplinary matters) to a more holistic process, more interested in the life stories of the interviewees and the social and cultural context to the development of scientific ideas and discovery.

Adopting a life history approach, or at least a broader framing for community oral history projects, means that even if there is an emphasis on a particular aspect of the interviewee’s life, occupation or academic discipline, that aspect can then be placed and better understood within a more expansive context. According to Doel ( 2003 , p. 357) taking this approach to interviews with scientists results in ‘important insights about disciplines and intellectual communities, all the while focusing on individual storytellers, their social and professional contexts and their world views’. Hilary Young’s ( 2011 ) account of an oral history project about the Open University demonstrates how a project conceived as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations was conducted in a fashion that undercut easy positive assumptions about the university’s history and instead explored tensions around working practices, regional identities and race. Another recent project in this vein is the NLS initiative an Oral History of British Science (OHBS 2009–2013). Like the more contemporary projects described by Doel, OHBS seeks to place a diverse cross-section of those whose lives are involved with science into a broader social and cultural context. In capturing ‘the lives of scientists in detail alongside accounts of their work’, OHBS has been able to document step-by-step descriptions of scientific processes as well as uncover the heavy demands of the scientific working life in the context of family lives; it has explored the masculine cultures of British science and the experience of women working in scientific occupations; and has provided evidence of the impact of childhood and education on the development of an interest in science (NLS 2014 ; Merchant 2013 ).

Although competition between academics is well established in the public mind, it has also been noted that academic disciplines and knowledge groupings often make for strong communities (communities of practice rather than communities of interest) which cut across other institutional loyalties and affiliations and exhibit solidarities and shared values in addition to criticism and competition (Kogan 2000 , p. 211–213). The necessity for these solidarities and sense of community is perhaps even stronger amongst those working within an emergent discipline such as DH, which is challenged by and is challenging to the status quo, than it would be for better established and generally more self-confident disciplines. The interviews in the volume express this sense of solidarity very strongly, by generally affirming the significance of the community and the support it gave to individuals. Most, but not all, of the interviewees recall some antagonism or even hostility from other Humanities scholars in the early days of their careers and engagements with technology. They contrasted the collaborative and supportive ethos in the emerging Humanities Computing and latterly DH communities with the more competitive and sometimes confrontational atmosphere in other disciplines. Peer review and the conference forum is not only about being judged by colleagues, it can also be about peers supporting each other to develop and strengthen their community and the interviews seem to suggest that this was how it operated in the early years of DH.

Emergent communities can be inclusive but in their evolutionary or even revolutionary fervor they can also exclude others that express different, non-consensual views. It is important to recognize the differences expressed in these interviews and within the community broadly on the role of technology and whether DH could be considered a discipline or was more a reconfiguration aided by technology of existing disciplines. The choice of interviewees is crucial here. Rather than only interviewing those with more orthodox and conventional views within the community, care has been taken to also include the stories and thoughts of those who have different perspectives (Nyhan et al. 2015 , p. 75–78). Oral history has frequently been celebrated for playing a significant role in exploring such communities, being “an experiment in releasing ‘empirical knowledge’” by making visible and vividly giving voice to their inter-relationships, identifying the shared myths, foundation stories, creeds, values and sacred stories that underpin the identity of imagined communities’ (Perks 2010a , p. 42–43; Colton and Ward 2005 , p. 96). One of the strengths of community-based oral history in particular is the focus on the collective as well as the individual, which enables the oral historian to identify and explore the community’s shared history, the tacit knowledge and understandings the group retains as well as noting the significance of individual agency and divergences. However, this is only possible if the recruitment of interviewees is broad and inclusive, reflecting critical as well as positive voices (Young 2011 , p. 97–98) and the interviewer is skilled and prepared thoroughly in advance. A common criticism aimed at many community-focused or institutional anniversary projects is that they tend to approach their interviews as individual and unconnected. Whereas more thoughtful and ultimately successfully realised projects, such as the oral history of the Open University and the interviews on the history of DH, are able to analyse their interviews collectively by asking ‘critical questions about broad themes of social life that cut across individuals’ experience’ (Shopes 2006 , p. 263) in addition to capturing more personally specific memories and perspectives.

Another danger of community-focused interviews and projects is the extent to which the interviewer is an insider or an outsider and what that means for the inter-subjectivities of the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee. As an outsider, the interviewer may find it difficult to be welcomed into the community, or to have the knowledge or expertise necessary to ask the right questions. However, the opposite can also be true, with narrators opening up to a trusted outsider in a way they would not do to someone from within their community (Portelli 2013 , p. 278–279). An insider may have the credentials to get the interviews and to understand the situation enough to ask the right questions, but as insiders they may not acknowledge the shared tacit knowledge between them, they might avoid difficult and sensitive topics, or identify too closely with the community to present that community in anything other than the most favourable light. If there are significant cultural, socio-economic and power differences, it does not mean that the interview will not be a success but it will almost certainly impact on the dialogue in some way and that difference ought to be located and understood. An insider seeking to interview a person much senior within an organization or discipline may find it difficult to ask challenging, critical questions. The senior figure may find it equally hard not to self-censor themselves, give superficial answers or depart from their pre-prepared answers in such circumstances (Abrams 2010 , p. 161–162; Young 2011 , p. 104). The interviews in this volume are conducted by insiders, for the most part by the first author who is a reasonably well established member of the DH community. In one sense, therefore, these are intra-community interviews between peers but they also offer the impact of cross-generational interviewing between pioneers in the discipline and the generation that is now seeing the discipline of DH strengthen and mature.

Life history and broad contextual approaches to interviewing can be tremendously valuable in identifying special and significant events in an individual’s life and placing their choices and experiences within a wider context. However, much of the interest in individual lives comes from the coherence (and dissonance) between related interviews and of the critical analysis of the life stories collectively as well as individually. Linda Shopes argues that the frequent mismatch between community history and professional history approaches leads to unsatisfying results for both sides and suggests that successful projects come from the critical engagement with the intersections of individual lives, the identification of the historical problem which defines the community and the exploration of these problems through careful and targeted questions of the individual narrators ( 2006 , p. 268–269).

The interviews in this volume seek to follow this suggestion by asking of each of its interviewees a series of challenging questions which focus not just on their individual lives but also on cross-cutting aspects of their experiences in academia as part of the emergent discipline of DH. As outlined in the previous chapter, all the interviews take a qualitative, semi-structured approach, adhering to a common broad outline of their career and engagement with technology. The interviews seek to illuminate the journey of DH and Digital Humanists from the margins to ‘respectability’ by asking questions about early memories of interacting with technology, their technical and computer education, their first involvement in DH research, their influences, attitudes of other humanities scholars to their use of technology, and their first engagement with the DH community. Among the questions that this approach allow us to explore are what is DH? What are the discipline’s foundation stories and origin myths? Who were the innovators and early adopters in the discipline but also what were the social, intellectual and creative contexts they operated within? We also explore, to varying degrees, the extent to which the revolutionary rhetoric of transformation and innovation, of collaborative working and inclusivity is real and to what extent this rhetoric masks deeper tensions and critical voices; and finally what, if any, were the spaces for women in these different workplaces and evolving spaces. Among the many important understandings revealed by these interviews are the multiple paths into DH that were taken and, arguably, how this is manifested in the diverse and contested understandings of the discipline that abound, even in terms of whether it is possible to characterise it as a separate discipline or subject area. Given the importance of myths and imperfect memory in modern oral history, the dissonance between many of the interviewees’ memories of being ‘the underdog’ and struggling for recognition, with their present position as influential professors secure in their posts suggests to us that some of these shared origin stories of persecution have played a useful role as useful myths in building and sustaining the community on its journey to respectability (see Chap. 17).

In a recent volume on the subject of what the authors feel should be a fruitful and on-going relationship between oral history and DH, Doug Boyd and Mary Larson described what they feel are the similarities between the disciplines:

To those who have long had a foot in both worlds, however, the connections are clear and abundant. 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. (Boyd and Larson 2014 , p. 10)

This volume uses oral history and the interviews of the pioneers of using computers in the Humanities from around the world to explore the reality of many of these claimed tenets and disciplinary approaches within DH.

A Conclusion. Oral History and Communities: To Whom Does This History Belong?

Much oral history practice has stressed the importance, the primacy even, of the individual voice and experience. For the most part it has rejected social science norms of anonymity in favour of naming the narrator and acknowledging the interviewees’ ownership and authority over their words. Under the conditions of properly negotiated informed consent, oral historians argue that the interview is jointly authored by the interviewer who has devised and asked the questions and the interviewee whose narrative we are interested in recording. The individual stories belong to their narrator and that ownership and the significance of the voice is (most often) best attested to by naming that voice, thus ‘anonymity [is generally considered] antithetical to the goals of oral history’ (Larson 2013 , p. 38). But how is this advocacy of valid consent, shared authority and ownership squared with the oral historian’s frequent practice of asking for the assignment of the interviewee’s copyright over the recording and the reserving the right to quote, contextualise and interpret the words, motivations and expressions of their narrators and interviewees? Some argue that the oral historian should not only make their existence and agency transparent in the testimony (demonstrating that the words and records created are part of a dialogic exchange in which the interviewer and interviewee both have responsibility) but should also extend the process of informed consent beyond the interview and the transcript, sharing authority for those acts of selection, interpretation and publication traditionally claimed as the responsibility of the historian alone (Abrams 2010 , p. 166–167). If we are to claim that these stories truly belong to their narrators as much as to their interlocutors then surely we need to think about whether asking for copyright to be assigned away is consummate with that claim, and whether the best way to present these stories is not through the selection of ‘juicy quotations’ and interpretation but as is done in the rest of this book, via the presentation of the interviews in their full form (Geiger et al. 2010 , p. 14 & 22). Larson ( 2013 , p. 41). Others (Dougherty and Simpson 2012 ) have drawn attention to these apparent contradictions and the ‘distress’ they can cause, suggesting exploring use of Creative Commons licences as a possible solution. The approved publication of the full transcripts in this book under an open access licence, edited into a literary style (as opposed to a more natural verbatim style) to meet the concerns of some of the interviewees, and the availability of the recordings under a creative commons licence presents these interviews and the hidden histories they relate as a jointly constructed, jointed authored project between the interviewees and the interviewers.

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Oral History as an organized activity in this country dates only from 1948, when Professor Allan Nevins inaugurated "The Oral His. tory Project" at Columbia University.3 Since its modest beginnings, the. discipline of oral history has become a burgeoning field filled with endless research possibilities.
Oral History and the Story of America and World War II
Although oral history has struggled for legitimacy in the historical profession, it has always been central to telling the story of World War II. During the war years, historians and journalists began using oral history to celebrate the role of the United States in the conflict and to unravel the complex military and political events of the ...