Oral History Collection Research Articles

Voices from La Frontera

Established in 1972, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) Institute of Oral History (IOH) holds the largest collection of border-related oral histories in the United States. Containing interviews dating back to the 1960s, the collection is particularly strong with themes related to labor, immigration, the Bracero Program, and the Mexican Revolution. This article explores the history of the U.S. Border Patrol as gleaned from UTEP oral histories. El Paso and the Border Patrol have a very long and complicated history. The first officers were stationed in El Paso and the first training academy was there. Today, the presence of the Border Patrol is ubiquitous. Using the collection, we investigate what oral histories can tell us that official government documents cannot. How did Border Patrol officers feel about their work and about the people they encountered trying to enter the United States? How did the day-to-day work of Border Patrol officers change over time while the mission of the agency “to detect and prevent the illegal entry of individuals into the United States” remained the same? The article also sheds light on the response of migrants and immigration advocates to the work of the Border Patrol.

Comusichiamo. First Language, Life-Soundtracks and Storytelling to Support the Cultural Wellbeing of Migrants Living with Dementia

ABSTRACT This study, located at the intersection of anthropology, ageing, music therapy and dementia, explores the value of music, life-storytelling and first language, to support the cultural identity and wellbeing of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds living with dementia in Australia. It uses participant observation, the collection of oral histories and ‘life soundtracks’ to co-create a song with older Italian migrants and their families. This paper presents the first case study which informed the development of the music engagement program we call Comusichiamo (let’s make music together). The case study shows that the co-creation of a culturally tailored song, composed and sung in first language, can enhance physical and social engagement, and contribute to the general wellbeing of participants living with dementia, and their carers. Central to the program is the sharing of life history, comprising autobiographic memory, the use of ipsissima verba, the precise words participants employ repeatedly, and ipsissima fabula, the particularistic stories participants narrate frequently. This music engagement program supports a relationship-centred approach to dementia care, drawing on narrative theory and anthropological notions of personhood, and Benenzon’s notion of ‘sound identity’, to support cultural safety, protect personhood, and guard against ‘social death’.

Meaning-Making and Archive-Making: Teaching Oral History with Archives Professionals on Campus

ABSTRACT When faculty collaborate with archives professionals at their universities, they can together create oral history courses that engage students in both the meaning-making and archive-making dimensions of the practice. In this article, we summarize various archives-engaged approaches to teaching oral history and explore how these approaches benefit both students and university archives. As an illustrative example, we describe a course that we collaboratively designed and taught twice in 2020–21, in which students built a new collection of oral histories for the archives at DePaul University in Chicago. Drawing from this experience, we share recommendations about how to focus, structure, and coordinate courses that feature substantive collaboration with university archives. We also conclude that students in courses such as ours produce collections of interviews that may best be understood by archivists and researchers as “learners’ collections,” which, while valuable, raise questions about appropriate standards for preservation and access.

Interoperability of Oral History Metadata: An Ontological Model

ABSTRACT This article presents the metadata characteristics of oral history collections and the challenges faced when attempting to provide long-term access to audio or video recordings. We propose an ontological model combining the International Committee for Documentation Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM) from the cultural heritage field with European Broadcasting Union Core (EBUCore) from the European audiovisual community. We form a mapping methodology with the goal of combining the strongest attributes from these two standards. The goal of this research is to generate a conceptual model for the description of oral history interviews in order to reveal the entities participating in the interviews, their semantics, and their relationships. The proposed model enables the meaningful exchange of information of audiovisual collections and their integration with other cultural heritage collections in the online environment.

Sydney Speaks corpus: An overview

ABSTRACT Sydney Speaks is a sociolinguistic project exploring variation and change in Australian English. The Sydney Speaks corpus combines two legacy sub-corpora recorded in the 1970s and 1980s (Barbara Horvath’s Sydney Social Dialect Survey and the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection) with a contemporary sub-corpus, recorded from 2015 to the present (the ANU Corpus of Sydney Speech). Recordings come from oral histories and sociolinguistic interviews with 265 Sydneysiders, born from 1889 to 2001, stratified according to age, social class, gender and ethnicity. To date, approximately 120 h (1.2 million words) have been transcribed and time aligned at both the utterance and segment level. The corpus makes a unique contribution to the study of ethnic variation: as a longitudinal corpus, it facilitates real-time exploration of ethnic variation, allowing questions around the longevity of ethnolects to be answered; the class stratification of the data allows for consideration of the intersection between class and ethnicity; transcriptions that are time aligned at the level of the Intonation Unit and at the level of the segment allow for analyses of phonetic, morphosyntactic and discourse features; and the content of the interviews both provides contextualization for the linguistic patterns observed and sheds light on Australia’s history.

Capturing that which is Fleeting: Using History Harvests to Collect Rapid Response Oral Histories of Disaster Experience

ABSTRACT This article interrogates how oral historians can meaningfully participate in rapid response research after disasters as part of both short- and long-term collection efforts. The article first examines the known barriers to setting up rapid response oral history projects. Second, it proposes the use of a modified public history collections method known as a “History Harvest” to provide a valuable baseline for community experience of an incident’s impact that adds to current methods. Overall, this article emphasizes the importance of oral history collection in assisting communities in documenting their experiences with disasters and preserving memories of these events before they fade.

Counter-Colonial Aspects in and Through Public History in Brazil: Participatory Research, Oral History and Corporeality – Embodied Ways of Storytelling

Abstract Based on the counter-colonial thought formulated by the Brazilian quilombola activist Nêgo Bispo (1959–2023), this article offers reflections on participatory research, social memory, and corporeality through discussions carried out by the Brazilian Public History Network (Rede Brasileira de História Pública) – specifically covering the projects produced by the Laboratory of Oral History and the Image at Fluminense Federal University – LABHOI/UFF (Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, created in 1982). The author explores and recognizes the colonial nature of public history practices and identifies a counter-colonial public history that is capable of going beyond text-only source-based public history or which is written only out of official colonial records. Public history, it is suggested, can do this by developing participatory practices with the creation of oral history collections and incorporating embodied ways of storytelling.

Falling Leaves Not Returning to the Roots: Agency, Meaning and Complex Emotions in Chinese Women’s Narratives of Settling in Britain Since 1978

ABSTRACT Within the historiography of post-war migration to Britain, many authors have used oral history to explore women’s history of migration to and their lived experiences in Britain. However, current historiographical attention to the Chinese in Britain neglects post-war experiences, particularly those of women, and is yet to engage with rich oral history collections. Drawing on the voices of twelve women, this paper argues that, against the backdrop of relaxing exit controls in post-1978 China, women utilised socioeconomic resources and navigated accessible routes for crossing regional and national borders, displaying their will and resilience to use migration as a means of personal development, and, in some cases, showed pragmatism in seeking to emigrate. This paper expands the historiography of Chinese migration to Britain and adds to our understanding of gender and migration. It indicates that, despite their seeking personal development, Chinese women’s migration was conditioned by family responsibilities, and their narratives of migration incorporated consideration of family members. It highlights how changing policies in China enabled and motivated women’s migration to and permanent settlement in Britain. Teasing out these rationales helps us to rethink the history of ethnic minorities in Britain, moving beyond a (post)imperial framing.

Uncovering the Past Through Voices: Exploring Oral History as a Primary Source: A Case Study of the National Archives of Republic Indonesia [ANRI

This research explains the use of the oral history collection of the National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia (ANRI) to optimize historical information as a primary source. Sources of information with this primary category relate to information from historical actors or eyewitnesses and witnesses to an event. Oral history archives are the main content of this research. The method used is descriptive qualitative, focusing on observing the content of oral history information published on websites and various social media platforms affiliated with ANRI. This research aims to analyze the oral history collection owned by ANRI and the historical information content contained in the collection. The results of this paper describe the content of oral history, which has primary information specifications based on the information needs in the archives. This information is helpful to complement information originating from textual sources. Open access to ANRI’s oral history collection helps fulfill information needs that primary textual information sources cannot fully meet.
 Keywords: ANRI, archives, information services, oral history, primary sources, website

Development of Open Education Resources to Teach Oral History: Perspectives of a Sports Heritage-Engaged Scholarship Initiative in Gauteng, South Africa

Gaps exist in archival practices, and developments are in progress to decolonise and transform archives by supplementing existing archival collections with oral history accounts. This is a recent development in the archival field, requiring archivists and records managers to become aware of how oral history collections should be undertaken to preserve testimonies related to socio-economic, sociopolitical, and cultural events not yet captured by South African public archivists. An open educational resource (OER) was developed in 2022 as part of an engaged scholarship initiative to instruct archivists on oral history research techniques and how to apply research ethics when undertaking such projects. The research paradigm for this study was a postmodernist qualitative study. Action-based research was used in the research design. Action research is a flexible methodology uniquely suited to research and support change. It integrates social research with exploratory actions to promote development. Action research outcomes are both practical and theoretical. The knowledge it generates directly and continuously impacts the changing practices of the participants. Data from participants were collected through recorded project workshops and meetings. The content for the OER was developed from observing online videos showcasing oral history interviews, consulting literature on OER development, and discussions with archivists and heritage collectors at the South African National Film, Video and Sound Archives, the South African National Parks Board, and the Gauteng Provincial Archives. The OER was developed to enable collaboration to ensure that the oral narratives of postcolonial Africa, particularly post-apartheid South Africa, are not lost but captured by the public archives’ services for the benefit of South Africans and other interested stakeholders.

Incriminated writers and their wives: Gendered memory of a national campaign in Mao’s China

The primary source of this study is 76 video interviews concerning a political campaign by the Chinese Communist Party: the Anti-Hu Feng Counter-revolutionary Clique Movement (1955–1956). This campaign and the long incrimination of its central figures—Hu Feng (1902–1985), his wife Mei Zhi (1914–2004), and other associates—have had an impact on Chinese intellectuals for nearly seven decades and generated hundreds of (auto)biographies, memoirs, critical writings, and scholarly studies since the 1980s. Victimized writers managed to publish again, but the stories of their wives remained obscured and marginalized for years. This article presents three research findings: first, the wives provide different but equally essential testimonies as do the writers; second, methods used by feminist historians can benefit oral history collection from all, but from women and the marginalized in particular; and third, gendered memory helps to bridge the gap between those who have and have not personally experienced specific historical events.

Holocaust Oral History Sources in the Yahad-In Unum Archive Collection (Based on Volhynia-Podolia General District Materials)

The purpose of the article is to analyze the oral history collection of the Holocaust sources at the Yahad-In Unum scientific institution (Paris, France) on the example of the Nazi-occupied territories of the Volhynia-Podolia General District of Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism and scientific objectivity. Analysis of oral history sources is the main method of the research. Scientific novelty: For the first time in historiography, the oral history Holocaust sources of the Yahad-In Unum scientific institution were analyzed based on the example of the Volhynia-Podolia General District. The conclusions prove that the oral history sources of Yahad-In Unum have powerful potential for Holocaust studies. They have exclusive information that is not found in other sources. German and Soviet documents cannot fully shed light on Holocaust history. Instead, the stories of witnesses provide an opportunity to examine this topic in a multifaceted way.

Redressing Archival Harm: Ownership, Access, and Indigenous Knowledge

ABSTRACT Institutions that house Indigenous oral histories are often ignorant to the harm they perpetuate by treating these materials without rooting curatorial considerations in Indigenous approaches to knowledge. Issues of categorization, attribution, and access, among many others, often go unaddressed, causing serious harm to Indigenous peoples and their cultural resources. It is imperative that Western archives, libraries, and museums seek out alternatives to systems that perpetuate settler-colonialism, and work to place control of oral histories back in Indigenous hands. In this paper we present several considerations for working with Indigenous oral histories in Western archives, provide case studies that promote the ethical curation and sharing of Indigenous materials, and close with an overview of our current work to revitalize and redress a large collection of Native American oral histories presently housed at the University of Florida.

Oral History Indexing

ABSTRACT Oral history indexing (OHI) is a set of practices for audio/video content management that emerged with computer-based media. Through thematically defined passages within recordings, OHI provides electronically linked, timecode-level access to online oral history interviews and collections. Several institutions have developed multimedia OHI interfaces that, like an indexed book, allow cross-referencing to specific points within media documents, describe content through natural language, and promote browsing and exploring modes rather than literal text searching. This article describes the OHI work of seven pioneering institutions through case studies, highlighting a range of methodological approaches and system attributes. It also examines the phenomena of OHI through the lens of oral history best practices, discusses how emerging technologies such as automatic speech recognition will likely change oral history transcription practices and OHI, and suggests that the concepts and skills involved in OHI are applicable well beyond oral history and its content.

Through a queer lens: Sybil Morrison and Myrtle Solomon, stalwarts of the British and international peace movement

Abstract Sybil Morrison and Myrtle Solomon were leading pacifists in the twentieth-century British and international peace movements. Their combined activism straddled the Second World War, nuclear arms, colonial independence, opposition to the Vietnam War and the 1980s women’s peace movement. Women in a male-dominated movement, their lesbian identities remained hidden until pressure from the post-Stonewall generation persuaded them to come out, described by eyewitnesses as a pivotal moment for the movement. Interviews in three oral history collections predate the queer turn in history after their deaths. Examining these oral history sources enhances understanding of these influential women and faces the ethical challenge of posthumously loading private lives with political significance. This article bridges a gap between pacifist/Left and lgbtq+ narratives, answering a twenty-first century call for nuanced and multi-faceted history.

Capturing and Documenting the Wider Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan Initiative: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Interdisciplinary Project.

In the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, the global COVID-19 pandemic appeared amidst existing social health challenges in food insecurity, housing precarity and homelessness, poor mental health, and substance misuse. These chronic features intersected with the pandemic, producing a moment in time when the urgency of COVID-19 brought attention to underlying shortcomings in public health services. The objectives of the program of research are (1) to identify and measure relationships between the pandemic and wider health and social impacts, namely, food insecurity, housing precarity and homelessness, and mental health and substance use in Saskatchewan, and (2) to create an oral history of the pandemic in Saskatchewan in an accessible digital public archive. We are using a mixed methods approach to identify the impacts of the pandemic on specific equity-seeking groups and areas of social health concern by developing cross-sectional population-based surveys and producing results based on statistical analysis. We augmented the quantitative analysis by conducting qualitative interviews and oral histories to generate more granular details of people's experiences of the pandemic. We are focusing on frontline workers, other service providers, and individuals within equity-seeking groups. We are capturing digital evidence and social media posts; we are collecting and organizing key threads using a free open-source research tool, Zotero, to trace the digital evidence of the pandemic in Saskatchewan. This study is approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Saskatchewan (Beh-1945). Funding for this program of research was received in March and April 2022. Survey data were collected between July and November 2022. The collection of oral histories began in June 2022 and concluded in March 2023. In total, 30 oral histories have been collected at the time of this writing. Qualitative interviews began in April 2022 and will continue until March 2024. Survey analysis began in January 2023, and results are expected to be published in mid-2023. All data and stories collected in this work are archived for preservation and freely accessible on the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan project's website. We will share results in academic journals and conferences, town halls and community gatherings, social and digital media reports, and through collaborative exhibitions with public library systems. The pandemic's ephemeral nature poses a risk of us "forgetting" this moment and the attendant social inequities. These challenges inspired a novel fusion among health researchers, historians, librarians, and service providers in the creation of the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan project, which focuses on preserving the legacy of the pandemic and capturing data to support an equitable recovery in Saskatchewan. DERR1-10.2196/46643.

Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work

Queer collective memory during the time of COVID: Timelessness, isolation, and resilience in the United Kingdom.

Oral history collections both rely on and preserve community memories, and are of importance for understanding marginalized communities, particularly when they privilege minority voices. This article draws from original, video-based oral histories conducted for the United Kingdom's national LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others) museum, Queer Britain, focusing on an ongoing collection of oral histories organized around experiences related to the COVID pandemic. In order to protect the health of those interviewed and the interviewers, the researchers used virtual meeting software to record video interviews and utilized qualitative software to expand and support interview analysis. Specific oral history methodologies and concepts are explored, and museum studies content is briefly discussed, specifically as it relates to museums of marginalized people. Themes explored include isolation and timelessness, the impact of the pandemic on diverse LGBTQ+ communities, and HIV/AIDS.

Archiving Bilingual Latin@ Oral Histories

Over the past ten years, digital archives documenting underrepresented communities have been rising. For example, oral and print historical projects about minoritized communities and ethnic cultural heritage centers have existed for decades (Daniel, 2010), yet few are fully accessible online. The increased presence of these types of archives points not only to the need to document the histories of these communities but also to the interest in making this work accessible to all. There is an urgency in documenting, archiving, and curating histories—audio, print, video, and other ephemera—because minoritized communities have consistently faced exclusion from majority historical documents. As precarious and essential as this work is, important projects like the one discussed here are often shared as an in-process version. This process allows us to shape and consider new ways of archiving, perhaps even disrupting traditional collecting and accessioning methods beyond canonical (White) standards. This article shows our interest in developing a decolonized model for archiving digital oral history collections. Indeed, much of the way we are thinking about making the collection accessible is by centering it on bilingual descriptions of each item in the collection signals a non-traditional and, thus, decolonial way of documenting a community. “Archiving Bilingual Latin@ Oral Histories” is an initiative to make an already existing digital oral history archive accessible to the community it documents. From collecting stories, accessioning, and website design and content, it seeks to work collaboratively with students and the community to present a bilingual archive representing the Latina/o/x community in Ohio.

“Not a Word Was Said Ever Again”: Silence and Speech in Women’s Oral History Accounts of Sexual Harassment

ABSTRACT Oral history collections provide rich evidence for understanding sexual harassment in the era before that term applied to unwanted sexual advances in schools and workplaces. Close reading of both speech and silence about sexual harassment in oral histories also illuminates women’s historical reluctance to recall or make public their experiences of sexual violence. Drawing on a large dataset of digitized oral history collections, this essay maps women’s memories of, and responses to, sexual harassment from the late 1930s through the mid-1970s. Whether they minimized the problem or identified with it, the narrators who addressed sexual harassment typically emphasized women’s personal responsibility and the lack of institutional accountability. Their recollections also reveal a range of individual forms of resistance that women employed before feminists named or laws prohibited sexual harassment.