Sessions Aplenty!

I’ve been a bit silent on the blog here due mainly to the mad rush of panel presentations I’ve attended the past couple of days. At the same time it has been great to see friends and coworkers pop up at various times. I must say it can be quite amazing how hard it can be to schedule rendevous with such an action-packed program.

I hope everyone is following our Twitter feed @oralhistreview as it has been my best tool live-blogging the action. If not, here are some of the highlights:

– Friday morning’s Newcomers’ Breakfast not only allowed me to converse with my fellow neophytes, but also begin to acertain what many first-time attendees are searching for this year, and what might be offered next years to accomedate the more common themes.

– In the Archiving Oral History panel I learned of Nancy MacKay’s impressive work surveying the greater OH scene, mainly domestically but also with some international flavor, in order to give us an idea where our oral histories are and what are being done to them. I’m very interested to see what can be done with her vision of creating a dynamic online component for the data, and perhaps I might see what I can do to aid that endeavor 😉

– The Campus OH Roundtable sparked a good discussion on the pros/cons of video interviews, but my favorite soundbite still came from Troy Reeves and his 4 Cs of Campus Programs: Collect, Curate, Communicate & Collaborate.

– Our keynote speaker Friday was Wade Goodwyn from NPR. After some troubling reminiscences on the Waco and OKC disasters, Wade focused more on a topic that I personally feel needs more attention from all fields: the corporatization of the US incarceration industry. I can just feel a good Emerging Crisis grant application or two stemming from Wade’s call to action from our discipline…

– I was proud of co-worker Michelle Holland’s presentation in the New Answers to Old Questions panel of the newly updated Baylor University Institute for Oral History (BUIOH) Style Guide. I know many in our field already take advantage of the decades of experience that has been poured into this guide, but I encourage those unfamiliar to give it a look at www.baylor.edu/oralhistory

– My friend former co-worker at the BUIOH Priscilla Martinez flew in last night so I spent the evening catching up with her. She presented this morning in the Myth, Memory and Malice in the Making of Mexican-American Cultural Identities panel. This was an awesome collection of three PhD candidates presenting wonderful work on a section of US History that in many ways has been swept under the rug or forgotten entirely. I personally hope OHA highlights this sort of minority-based research more in the future, perhaps with a corresponding award category?

That’s it for now – off to a panel soon on Hydraulic Fracturing (really excited about this one!). Please enjoy the action shots below!