In OHR’s 2023 special issue on “Disrupting Best Practices,” Douglas Lambert presented an overview of the last several decades of oral history indexing, a strategy for creating entry points in oral history audio and video. Here, we ask Doug a few questions about the practice and what it means for the state of the field […]
In OHR’s spring 2023 issue,scholar Estelle B. Freedman shares her findings from a macro-level analysis of oral history databases in order to analyze women’s memories and responses to sexual harassment and violence. Freedman’s research shows the potential of applying digital humanities tools for distance reading to the close reading of intimate details of oral histories. […]
It’s once again that time of year when oral historians from across the globe unite for the annual meeting. Here we preview some sessions and events the editorial team is looking forward to. By Janneken Smucker We were supposed to all be in Baltimore for the Oral History Association Annual Meeting in fall of 2020. […]
In OHR’s spring 2023 issue, scholar Katherine Waugh analyzes the methodological challenges oral historians face with technological fluctuations. Focusing on the post-pandemic wave of remote interviewing that has expanded oral historians’ ability to conduct interviews, Waugh considers the difficulties that scholars face in “connecting” to narrators in a virtual world. “Failing to Connect? Methodological Reflections on Video-Call […]
During the last year, artificial intelligence has made increased in-roads into many facets of society. Yet what does it pose for the field of oral history? Duquesne University professor Jennifer Taylor worked with her Intro to Oral History students to investigate some of the implications for ChatGPT and oral history. The provoking post opens possibilities […]
StoryCorps may perhaps be the United States’ most familiar and largest oral history project, yet many oral historians have trouble knowing whether to embrace it as such. Guest contributor Aubrey Parke suggests that another lens through which to consider StoryCorps is digital humanities, with its ethos of crowdsourcing and collaborative forms of publication. What can […]
The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project recently completed an NEH-funded project to transform its oral history collection through the use of cutting edge oral history technologies that allow exploration of interviews through bilingual indexes. Here, Wexler Oral History staff members share their process and innovative results. By Christa Whitney and Carole Renard The […]
Across the world, university students’ lives were upended by the coronavirus pandemic, with the essential community structures enabled by face-to-face interaction no longer possible. Yale senior Henry Jacob and his co-producers launched a podcast to help keep the community connected, with a built in archival structure that preserves the podcast as a primary source, documenting […]
Digital technologies have created the opportunity to share oral history interviews in new ways, as evidenced by the many projects we discuss here on the blog and in the journal’s media reviews. The educational nonprofit, Clio, offers a place-based website and mobile interface to experience history where it happened. A recent update allows integration of […]
In OHR‘s ongoing series investigating how COVID-19 is changing the field of oral history, this post by Shu Wan discusses the implications of “digitizing” the interview process itself, with remote interviews conducted over web cams and microphones. What happens when uninvited guests appear in the interview? By Shu Wan During the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing […]
