Practice Of Oral History Research Articles

The 1935 Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake

The history of natural disasters in Taiwan has frequently been linked to the practice of historical preservation, archival science, oral history, and museum curatorship. All are collectively hallmarks of a broad range of activities that fall under the umbrella of public history. The problem for Taiwan, however, concerns the legitimacy. Taiwan does not have a single national narrative. It has been subjected to waves of colonialism since the seventeenth century and does not presently have a fully post-colonial narrative. The earthquakes discussed in this paper occurred in two different periods of colonisation. In order to situate the history of earthquakes into a public history discourse, the field of earthquake-based research in Taiwan has to incorporate different audiences and integrate into a much broader understanding. By this, I mean that the present regimental academic disciplines in Taiwan need to be cross disciplinary, especially since public history is by its very nature collaborative. It illuminates a shared authority over a much wider area. It needs to. It is my argument that it is in digital humanities that Taiwanese academics work best in collaboration. Efforts have been made to digitise the personal experiences of those involved in typhoon reconstruction efforts. A natural synergy, therefore, for the understanding of earthquakes, as public history, is to emphasise access and broad participation in the creation of knowledge. Digital humanities enables this. Attention to this is particularly important in historical preservation of particular sites on an island that frequently develops and re-develops brownfield sites.

“We Hung around the Radio with Great Interest”: Accessing Childhood Recollections of World War II through Interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACTIn this article, we – an historian and a cognitive psychologist – address the interdisciplinary approach undergirding the oral history project Childhood Narratives of World War II on the Home Front. This project collects and analyzes the narratives of those who were between the ages of 5 and 18 during World War II through the lens of oral history and cognitive processing methodologies. We aim to collect roughly 200 oral histories, digitally archive the audios and transcriptions, and use them to access childhood realities of the home front across nationalities, cultures, and languages. This project is predicated on the idea that children were key actors in the creation of home front cultures across national borders, and that the integration of cognitive science into the practice of oral history gives interviewers access to rich, deeply nuanced narratives of a significant, but often overlooked, population. We argue that this approach, when executed systematically and thoughtfully, allows interviewers and narrators to break through decades-old metanarratives to understand the quotidian and widely varied realities of children on the home front. We call on oral historians of all stripes to reach out to colleagues who might approach interviewing from different angles. In so doing, we create greater opportunities to complicate our understanding of the past.

Footballers, ‘Public Figures’, and Cultural Struggles in Colombia in the 1960s and 1970s

This article has two interrelated objectives. The first is to show how Colombian footballers in the 1960s and 1970s created different understandings of their trade. These understandings challenged prevailing narratives about players’ regional belongings and were imbued with the values and memories that the players’ communities assigned to being a man; to participate in public life, and to perform collective practices, whether productive, recreational or entertaining. The second aim is to demonstrate that the practice of oral histories with footballers allows us to detect and analyze the specificity of these values and memories, and to discover the cultural struggles that players incited by articulating their sports trajectories with the history of their communities and regions. While those cultural struggles left traces in the sporting journals, their true meaning and political potential emerge only through the practice of oral history, this is when players have the opportunity to reflect systematically on their experiences with an ‘other’ who is different but interested. The article focuses on the trajectories of three Colombian players but builds on extensive research with 52 footballers.

Migration and Inclusive Transnational Heritage: Digital Innovation and the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative

Digital, Internet-based technologies present oral historians with opportunities to build an “inclusive transnational heritage” that enables users, especially migrants, to get a better understanding of countries to which they plan to immigrate or of the developments and changes in the countries from which they emigrated to document their experiences moving to and settling in new destinations. In this article, we offer new insight into the kinds of oral history practices that can advance a paradigm of this inclusive transnational heritage with migrant populations. We describe new tools and strategies designed to facilitate global access to oral histories and engage migrants and other public audiences in heritage initiatives. This recent project of the New Roots/Nuevas Raíces Oral History Initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created an Internet-based digital information system and bilingual website by innovating with the open-source software Omeka. We describe the process of designing this system collaboratively with migrant narrators, Latin American scholars, and K-12 teachers and describe the technical aspects of tools we developed to map migrant journeys, sync data from institutional archival systems, and facilitate the online presentation of content in two languages. We consider the ethical and methodological challenges of engaging with internationally mobile populations who settle in new regions where they face linguistic, socioeconomic, and legal challenges that hinder access to educational and governmental resources.

Two Decades of Making Oral History in Romania

As communism performed a constraint of both individual and collective memory, its fall in 1989 opened the path to a plurality of voices that generated alternative accounts to the official discourse maintained by the regime. While many victims were sharing their stories of suffering, compromise, resistance or dissent, oral history was taking its first steps in connection to these unique and valuable testimonies. The interest of the researchers gradually expanded towards documenting different aspects of everyday life and identities during communism and post-communism. Starting with an approach of the theoretical and ethical issues behind Romanian oral history making, the paper reviews the main initiatives leading to the establishment of oral history as an academic discipline, while at the same time inquiring into the reasons that propelled the practice of oral history in Romania. Both the actors and institutions that have made and managed oral history will be taken into account.

When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin by Anna Shternshis

Reviewed by: When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin by Anna Shternshis Jarrod Tanny Anna Shternshis. When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Xii + 264 pp. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 0190223103. Who gets to tell the story? In Anna Shternshis’s When Sonia Met Boris it is 474 Ashkenazi Jews, all born in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union between 1906 and 1928, Soviet citizens who came of age during the Stalin era and experienced the attendant social upheavals and cataclysmic events that marked this tumultuous era. Through oral histories, Shternshis seeks to uncover the daily lives of her subjects, how work, home, family, and migration patterns intersected with being Jewish in a time of modernization, famine, terror, war, and, antisemitism. The collapse of the USSR engendered a massive wave of Jewish emigration. Shternshis conducted her interviews in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Russia over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The result is an informative, sophisticated, and lively account of Soviet Jewish history, one that “fleshes out and revises the historical record” (21) because “some events in Soviet Jewish history simply cannot . . . be understood properly without oral histories.” (9) When Sonia Met Boris is divided into three parts. In part one, Shternshis reflects on the practice of oral history, its strengths, and its limitations. She illustrates the techniques she used to get her interviewees to voice their histories, fully cognizant that hindsight, location, and her own role as an intermediary might severely compromise the stories they tell. In parts two and three, Shternshis examines Soviet Jewish family life and Jews in the Soviet workplace. In the eight chapters that make up these two sections, she strikes a delicate balance between a chronological thematic approach, periodically returning to topics already discussed—marriage, education, internal migration in search of work, fear of shame and arrest during Stalin’s purges—because such is the nature of human memory. The author tries to go where her subjects take her, letting them articulate their past as they remember it. But ever aware of her own role as mediator, Shternshis regularly tells the reader when her subjects’ responses surprised her, undermined her previous assumptions, or resonated with her as a scholar and—one may speculate—as a Soviet Jewish émigré. “Teachers were my favorite narrators,” writes Shternshis. “They were the most articulate, usually recalled events of the past with remarkable detail, were amazing storytellers, spoke loudly and clearly, and made sure the interviewer understood their point,” even though “they quickly recognized the interviewer’s agenda and sometimes exaggerated.” (123) Such personal interjections strengthen Shternshis’s work, because they remind the reader that the collector and interpreter of oral histories is not (and can never be) an impartial conveyer of unfiltered material. Although Shternshis’s composite picture of “the first Soviet Jewish generation” offers insight into many questions typically raised by scholars, two conclusions stand out. First, the final period of Stalin’s reign, 1948–53—what is commonly referred to as “the black years of Soviet Jewry” because of the [End Page 94] sharp uptick in state-sponsored antisemitism—was in fact a turning point in the lives of most of her subjects. “Whoever forgot that he was as a Jew, or didn’t know, learned about it in 1948!” (122) stated countless interviewees to Shternshis, because being Jewish became a liability; it prompted an enduring awareness that antisemitism could lead to obstructed professional mobility, public ridicule, and even arrest. But “these stories of antisemitism are not solely tales of victimhood,” (108) cautions Shternshis, because her subjects presented them as “quests,” as challenges that they needed to face and surmount, much as “one beats a disease, succeeding despite being burdened by misfortune.” (188) Shternshis may not be the first historian to reach this conclusion, but her use of oral testimony allows us to see how Soviet Jews perceived their changing relationship to the state and to their non-Jewish neighbors. It reveals the many secrets people kept and it fills in the spaces of silence historians encounter in archival and printed sources...

Silêncios persistentes - fontes que não falam, fontes que falam mas não se ouve, fontes que contam outra história

El presente artículo reflexiona sobre la práctica de la historia oral a partir de una experiencia de trabajo con archivos fotográficos familiares y la recolección de una serie de entrevistas realizadas a los efectos de reunir memorias sobre la dictadura portuguesa, las guerras de liberación de las antiguas colonias y el período revolucionario de 1974-1975. El trabajo ilumina varias cuestiones centrales del uso de testimonios orales: el proceso de toma de entrevistas, el significado de los silencios, la importancia de la escucha por parte del/la entrevistador/a, la mutabilidad de los relatos en contextos diversos y el rol de las relaciones de género en la elaboración de los testimonios.

Discussiedossier Inleiding: oral history en geschiedenisonderwijs

Abstract Oral history and history education. Current status and new possibilities Oral accounts have become increasingly popular in the heritage field and in popular culture. The relative lack of engagement with oral history in history education in the Netherlands is therefore surprising. Unlike in surrounding countries, as well as in the Anglo-Saxon world, hardly any attention is given to oral history in history teacher training curricula. Existing initiatives depend entirely on the efforts of individual teachers, and are often isolated from other interview projects, heritage institutions, and the school curriculum. A solid foundation and a sustainable structure are needed to strengthen and expand the important initiatives in the field of oral history in education. These issues are even more pressing against the background of the digital revolution and its effects on oral history. What opportunities are there for oral history in the classroom, and (how) can digitization strengthen the practice of oral history in teaching and research? The contributions in this section are based on focus group interviews with student history teachers, questionnaires among teachers and students, and/or literature study. They present multiple opportunities for implementing oral history in history education, as well as suggestions for further research.

Making Histories

This article reflects upon a Heritage Lottery–funded project devised by Britain’s leading practitioner of reminiscence arts, Age Exchange. “Meeting in No Man’s Land” explored the different family legacies of the First World War by bringing together the British and German descendants of its veterans.1 The project process had many similarities to the practice of oral history, but there were also significant differences. This article considers the shared territory of the two methodologies while at the same time acknowledging the uniqueness of Age Exchange’s approach to the making of histories.

A View of Women's Studies from Afar and Near

396 Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Lisa Rofel A View of Women’s Studies from Afar and Near As a member of the editorial collective of Feminist Studies, I have had the pleasure of reading the submissions to this special issue on the state of women’s, gender, feminist, and sexuality (WGFS) studies programs . All the accepted articles highlight why WGFS studies programs have been, and continue to be, a vital part of intellectual training in US academies. I read the submissions from a particular perspective: that of having been trained in a discipline I happen to love, cultural anthropology , and at the same time always having been a feminist scholar within my discipline. When I was deciding which PhD program to enter, feminist anthropology was beginning to garner much attention. Along with feminist historians, feminist anthropologists were not only trying to include women in the picture, but were asking instead how attention to gender transforms the big questions about politics, social relations, and cultural meanings. This feminist approach would forever change how anthropologists analyze culture and power. Since I was both a feminist and an anti-imperialist activist, anthropology felt like the right discipline to choose. That might seem like a strange juxtaposition—anti-imperialism and anthropology—for those not familiar with the history of the discipline. When I entered graduate school, some anthropologists had already begun the self-critique of the discipline and its collusions with colonialism. As I moved through my graduate program, I was part of the creative efforts to figure out what kind of anthropology we could Lisa Rofel 397 foster that would be anti-colonial as well as post-colonial. It was a heady and exciting time to experience how we could develop a critique of culture and power. Reading over the submissions for this special issue, I was reminded of feeling troubled by those students in interdisciplinary programs (and not just from WGFS studies programs) who approach faculty in conventional disciplines only for training in methods. Frankly, I am very tired of being treated this way. In my discipline, methods are tied to the kinds of theoretical questions someone wants to ask. Texts that explain, for example, how to do an oral life history demonstrate how the method is tied to analytical/political questions. One of the best texts in this vein is Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai’s Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.1 We never train our students merely in how to engage in participant-observation or how to conduct an interview, but rather how to think analytically about what the student wants to ask in the first place. For example, one of the graduate students I work with, Kali Rubaii, just finished her PhD dissertation, “Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province,” for which she also did analogous research in the Palestinian territories. In such conditions , one has to think very carefully about how one works with—rather than does research on—the people whose horrendous living conditions (thanks to US imperialism) under what Rubaii calls “less-than-lethal counterinsurgency” matter a great deal for the rest of us to understand.2 Rather than interview them or do something called participant-observation , Rubaii did what she calls “transhumant ethnography,” which meant she decided that ethically she had to live through everything that her interlocutors were living through, including constantly moving from one unsafe or only temporarily safe place to another. Rubaii’s work, as an example, reminds us that methods are inextricably linked with the power dynamics infusing the worlds we study. In addition to the matter of methods, I am concerned about a problematic assumption that what distinguishes and even defines WGFS 1. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 2013). 2. Kali Rubaii, Counterinsurgency and the Ethical Life of Material Things in Iraq’s Anbar Province (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2018). 398 Lisa Rofel studies programs is attention to power. This assumption reflects the need for students in interdisciplinary programs to learn more about the genealogy of the theoretical...

Raza Unida Party Women in Texas: Oral History, Pedagogy, and Historical Interpretation

This article emerged out of an effort to provide graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin opportunities to understand the theory and practice of oral history in a classroom setting. The students were also expected to collectively plan and carry out a project that focused on the experiences and retrospective assessments of nine former female members of the Raza Unida Party, a third party that fielded candidates in the 1972, 1974, and 1978 Texas statewide elections. The hands-on approach involving the exercise of recovering Mexican American and women’s history through oral narratives and testimonios optimized the students’ learning experience in oral history and generated new knowledge and preliminary analysis on the importance of women in Mexican American history. The classroom experience had special importance for the all-female and ethnically mixed group of students who were able to share and valorize their feminist values and views in preparation for their encounter with the Raza Unida Party women. Martha Cotera, one of the narrators, provided a valuable conceptual tool for analyzing the views of her fellow Raza Unida Party members on inequality, power, and agency. Women, according to Cotera, were the “backbone” of the party.

Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork

This article offers an overview of the literature on anticipating and managing danger in qualitative fieldwork as it pertains to the practice of oral history in various settings. It offers an alternative perspective to the widespread assumption that oral history is an inherently positive endeavor that results in good relationships and positive outcomes. This article explores some of the circumstances through which danger can emerge in the course of oral historical fieldwork, both in relatively benign and in overtly hostile settings. It also offers preliminary recommendations for anticipating and managing these forms of harm.

Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age: How New Technology Is Changing Oral History Practice

The digital turn has had a profound impact on the practice of oral history. This article calls for a robust and critical reflection on how this turn has impacted both the process of conducting interviews and our efforts to analyze and disseminate them. Using a feminist and humanistic approach to oral history, we examine the ethical and methodological implications of databasing and indexing software, of putting our interviews on the Web, and of engaging with tech capitalism. We argue that oral history interviewing and interpretation are, ideally, intentionally slow processes, while digital technology prides itself on its speed, leading us to ask: how do we reconcile the two?

Digital Aural History: An Australian Case Study

Digital technologies and tools are transforming the presentation, interpretation, and use of oral history. Using a case study of the Australian Generations Oral History Project, this article focuses on how we have documented interviews and are presenting and interpreting them through writing in online formats that integrate aural material. I consider the interpretative opportunities and challenges posed in four elements of our digital oral history practice: the online discussion forum though which interviewers share their account of each interview; the searchable timed summaries that are linked to the audio recording for each interview; the ZOTERO database that we use to access, search, and share the material generated by the project; and an aural history book that will combine text and audio.

Oral History in the Digital Age: Beyond the Raw and the Cooked

Based on the keynote at the 2014 Australian Generations research conference, this article maps the landscape of oral history practice in the digital age. Surveying all that is changing (and much that is not) it locates digital content management of interview recordings—exemplified by Australian Generations—at the centre of emerging practice. More broadly, the article explores meaningful access to content within and across interviews as a curatorial space and sensibility with transformative implications, given its location midway between the traditional focus either on conducting and archiving interviews (the raw), or producing and disseminating documentary or scholarly outputs (the cooked).

Between word and text in life narratives

The purpose of this essay is to examine the relationships between “the oral” and “the written” in a particular application of narrative research (life rendering research). First, we examine a functional and valuing contrast between oral and written language within oral history methods. Second, we present a critical examination of the use of these linguistic predispositions as they impact life history narratives. Next, we examine a particularly close analogy between oral history and psychiatric patient write-up. Finally, the historical oral/written tension located in oral history practice is located within the frameworks of newer, media-based literacies. The tensions that these intentions create are particularly acute in power-based relationships, such as those between interviewers and informants. Therefore, the organization of the paper is a series of issues that combine to form a critical look at the use of informants’ words in the written narratives of the oral history as a form of discourse synthesis (Spivey, 1997).

The culture of midwifery and autonomy

British Journal of MidwiferyVol. 22, No. 9 Your VoiceThe culture of midwifery and autonomyJenny SmithJenny SmithSearch for more papers by this authorJenny SmithPublished Online:9 Sep 2014https://doi.org/10.12968/bjom.2014.22.9.675AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail View articleReferencesAnderson K, Jack DC (1991) Learning to listen: Interview techniques and analysis. In: Gluck SBPatai D (Eds) Women's words: The feminist practice of oral history. Routledge, New York Google ScholarBarry (2006) Humanity and justice in global perspective. In: Goodin REPettit PPogge TW (Eds) Contemporary political philosophy : An anthology. Blackwell, Oxford Google ScholarBattersby S (2014) The role of the midwife in breastfeeding: Dichotomies and dissonance. British Journal of Midwifery 22(8): 551–6 Link, Google ScholarDeci EL, Ryan RM (2000) The ‘what’ and ‘why’ of goal pursuits: Human needs and the selfdetermination of behaviour. Psychological Inquiry 11(4): 227–268. Crossref, Google Scholarde Jonge A, van der Goes BY, Ravelli AC, Amelink-Verburg MP, Mol BW, Nijhuis JG, Bennebroek Gravenhorst J, Buitendijk SE (2009) Perinatal mortality and morbidity in a nationwide cohort of 529 688 low-risk planned home and hospital births. BJOG ı(9): 1177–84. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-0528.2009.02175.x Crossref, Google ScholarDepartment of Health (1993) Changing Childbirth: Report of the Expert Maternity Group P. The Stationery Office, London Google ScholarEdwards N (2004) Why can't women just say no? And does it really matter? Kirkham M (Ed) Informed Choice in Maternity Care. Palgrave MacMillan, London Google ScholarEgan G (1990) The skilled helper: A systematic approach to effective helping. Pacific Grove, California Google ScholarGreen JM, Coupland VA, Kitzinger JV (1990) Expectations, experiences and psychological outcomes of childbirth: A prospective study of 825 women. Birth 17(1): 15–12 Crossref, Google ScholarGuilliland K, Pairman S (1995) The midwifery partnership : A model for practice. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington Google ScholarHodnett ED, Downe S, Walsh D (2012) Alternative versus conventional institutional settings for birth. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 8: CD000012. doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD000012.pub4 Google ScholarJomeen J (2006) Choice in childbirth : psychology, experiences and understanding. PhD thesis, University of Leeds. Google ScholarJomeen J (2010) Choice, control and contemporary childbirth : understanding through women's stories. Radcliffe, Oxford Google ScholarKirkham M (1999) The culture of midwifery in the National Health Service in England. J Adv Nurs 30(3): 732–9 Crossref, Google ScholarKirkham M (2004) Informed Choice in Maternity Care. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke Google ScholarLevy V (1999) Maintaining equilibrium: A grounded theory study of the processes involved when women make informed choices during pregnancy. Midwifery 15(2): 109–19 Crossref, Google ScholarMande R (1993) Who chooses the choices? Modern Midwife 5(1): 23–5 Google ScholarMander R (2001) Supportive care and midwifery. Blackwell Science, Oxford Crossref, Google ScholarNursing and Midwifery Council (2012) Midwives rules and standards. Nursing Midwifery Council, London Google ScholarOakley A (2005) The Ann Oakley Reader : Gender, Women, and Social Science. Policy, Bristol Crossref, Google ScholarPublic Health England (2014) Public health contribution of nurses and midwives: guidance. PHE, London Google ScholarRoyal College of Midwives (2008) Position statement: Women centred care. RCM, London Google ScholarRyff CD (1989) Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57(6): 1069–81 Crossref, Google ScholarSilverton L (1993) The Art and Science of Midwifery. Prentice Hall, London Google ScholarSteele R (1995) Midwifery Care in the First Stage of Labour. Levy AJRoch S (Eds) Aspects of Midwifery Practice: a research based approach. Macmillan, Basingstoke Crossref, Google ScholarSymonds A, Hunt SC (1996) The Midwife And Society: Perspectives, Policies And Practice. Macmillan Press, London Crossref, Google ScholarSymon A (2006) Risk and Choice in Maternity Care : An International Perspective. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh Google Scholar FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails 2 September 2014Volume 22Issue 9ISSN (print): 0969-4900ISSN (online): 2052-4307 Metrics History Published online 9 September 2014 Published in print 2 September 2014 Information© MA Healthcare LimitedPDF download

Reflecting on the Quantum Leap: Promises and Perils of Oral History on the Web

The digital revolution has enabled a return to orality/aurality and has helped to further the democratizing potential of oral history by providing the tools for wide distribution and access. Yet, this promise also raises serious questions about the personal and political implications of unfettered access, particularly in this age of both heightened government surveillance and unintended uses of materials posted on the World Wide Web. This article addresses these issues, as well as problems of website design and obsolescence, and advocates reconsideration of our oral history practices, including making our interview agreements with narrators subject to future negotiations

Oral History and the Hidden Histories project: towards histories of computing in the humanities

This article demonstrates that the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic. It argues that this oversight must be remedied as a matter of urgency so that the evolutionary model of progress that currently dominates the field can be countered. We describe the ‘Hidden Histories’ pilot project and explore the origins and practice of oral history; in the corresponding issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, five oral history interviews that we carried out during the project are presented. We conclude that the selection of interviews presented here demonstrate that oral history is an important and productive methodology in such research. The five oral history interviews form primary sources, which can be used in the writing of a history of computing in the humanities; furthermore, they contain new information and interpretations, which cannot be gleaned from published scholarly articles, for example, information about the varied entry routes into the field that have existed and the interrelationship between myth and history in the narratives we create about the emergence of digital humanities.

Memory and history in twenty-first century Australia: A survey of the field

This essay surveys the fields of oral history and memory studies in Australia since the publication of the landmark volume Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia in 1994. It argues that the practice of oral history has been central to memory studies in Australia, and explores key texts relating to the memory and commemoration of war, colonialism, Indigenous histories, trauma and witnessing in Australian society.