Lifecycles of Digital Oral Histories

Oral History in the Digital Age Project: An Annotated Bibliography

Author

Annotated by Colleen Cirocco

Definition of Project

There is a rich body of knowledge surrounding the topic of digital preservation of oral histories. These digital collections are crucial for making personal accounts of historic events and experiences accessible to a wide audience of researchers and individuals. However, attention is often given to the process of the interview itself and not the curation of its entire digital lifecycle. This annotated bibliography explores the concerns surrounding the digital lifecycle of oral histories through examining resources mostly published through the Oral History in the Digital Age project (OHDA). OHDA was a collaborative effort between institutions such as Michigan State University, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. In 2012 they released a dynamic webpage of resources and best practices for the curation of digital oral histories. This bibliography looks at three articles from each of the three main sections of the OHDA site. As delineated by OHDA, these sections represent important stages in the digital oral history lifecycle: Collection, Curation, and Dissemination. An article by the project evaluator of OHDA, as published in a journal focused on oral histories, was also selected in order to provide context about the project and to discuss its limitations.

Annotations

Boyd, D. A. (2012). Digital audio recording: the basics. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/digital-audio-recording/.

This article is a practical guide for recording digital audio and explores topics such as digital recorders, file types, and compression rates. Boyd stresses that the choices an interviewer makes, in preparation and during an interview, can affect the long term preservation of the file. For example, deciding between recording either a .wav or an .mp3 file will affect audio quality as well the amount of storage space required. He explains that compatibility and interoperability should also serve as guiding factors in decisions on equipment and file type selection. To this point, he advises against using technology that requires proprietary software to open the files, as this file not will not be compatible or usable on most machines, now and in the future. This paper also contains clear descriptions of technical audio recording concepts such as the difference between stereo and mono recordings, compression, bit ratios and depths. Even technological novices will be able to comprehend these concepts due to his conversational writing style, and will be able to retain this resource as a reference source for future use.

Boyd, D. A. (2012). Search, explore, connect: Disseminating oral history in the digital age. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/search-explore-connect/.

This paper illustrates that the OHDA caters to not only academic or archival audiences, but to smaller, independent groups as well. Boyd’s audience for this paper is non-archival professionals that are embarking on oral history projects. Their vision may be to incorporate these narratives into podcasts, documentaries, community projects, interactive exhibits, or any number of formats in the multi-media digital universe. Boyd urges his audience to consider the long term implications of starting an oral history project before scheduling the first interview. In terms of dissemination and storage, a website that may seem to be a great solution today may fall into obsolescence and disuse in five to ten years. For this reason he suggests collaborating with a professional archive who can care for the digital materials throughout their entire lifecycle. He remarks that planning for how these narratives will be disseminated, including important privacy concerns, needs to be done out of respect for the interviewees who are graciously offering up their stories to the historic record. Boyd boils down a tremendous body of knowledge to the most salient points for his audience of non-professional oral history enthusiasts. This reveals the heart of the discussion of these articles, that planning and respect must be at the center of any oral history project.

Boyd, D. A., & Hardy, C. (2012). Collecting in the digital age: an overview. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/collecting-in-the-digital-age/.

Boyd and Hardy’s look into the current state of collecting oral histories emphasizes the potential for cross-discipline collaboration and increased speed of access to these interviews. While this paper is less technical in nature, it provides an overview of the current climate within the oral history field. The authors reflect on the role of oral histories in our culture, which increasingly expects instant access to condensed information. Since oral histories are dense primary sources that can require patience, the authors explore ways in which they can fit into our rapid paced digital world. The article also serves as a motivating call to action for oral history practitioners to connect and collaborate with other disciplines, such as folklorists and ethnomusicographers, and combine the best practices of their work to create new multi-sensory projects. The authors also suggest starting the description process (such as adding metadata) during the creation process, to expedite the digital curator’s work of making the interview accessible digitally. The potential for these rich histories to be more accessible and more engaging through digital innovations encourages the reader to be an active agent in these advancements.

Cohen, S. (2013). Shifting questions: New paradigms for oral history in a digital world. The Oral History Review, volume 40(1), 154–167.

Having served as a project evaluator for the Oral History in the Digital Age (OHDA) project, Cohen provides an insider’s overview into the scope of the project as well as its limitations. He believes that OHDA did a wonderful job of creating a resource of best practices and instructions for new and advanced practitioners of oral histories. However, his questions in this article expand beyond that baseline of knowledge. His outsider perspective allows him to muse on expansive, speculative types of questions surrounding oral histories in the digital age, such as, “How can a single person, at one time, create metadata that will accommodate the possible interpretations of even one oral history, thirty years after it was recorded?” and “Can oral histories be mainlined directly to human brains, creating a sense that the interviewee is in some way connected to you?” Cohen looks beyond the scope of the OHDA and asks analytic questions that challenge the reader without providing any clear answers. The article will also be useful for anyone interested dissecting the differences between reading a transcript versus listening to the audio of an oral history, which Cohen discusses at length. Overall, Cohen’s user-focused perspective demands to know, now that we have a baseline of solid oral history practices, how will the world intercept them and what new responsibilities do we have to this wider audience?

Frisch, M., w/ Lambert, D. (2012). Mapping approaches to oral history content management in the digital age. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/07/mapping/.

This paper article examines content management as it relates to digital age oral history practices. The authors' use of the term content management is centered around the ability to know what content an oral history interview contains, and how and where to find specific content. Text based resources have long had digital search technology available to give users immediate access to specific material, and this paper describes how the same types of technology are currently being developed for audio and video. The authors address three main areas in the article: cataloging versus indexing, transcription versus recordings, and content mapping versus meaning mapping. They suggest that digital oral history technology should move in the direction of the latter in each pair. However, the difficulty in creating useful tools for users is that an oral history is less like an indexed history book and more like a novel. These interviews are long, complex, meandering, and a single sentence can reference multiple ideas, concepts, people, social norms all at once. A narrator describing a strike may never use the word “strike” once, and in these cases, how does an indexer delineate these unstated or multidimensional meanings? The authors go into much greater depth grappling with these questions, and the resulting article pushes the boundaries between what has been done in the past and what the future may hold.

Frisch, M., Lambert, D., Tebeau, M., and Bell, E. (2012). Oral history curation in the digital age: A framework for choices and planning. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/oral-history-curation-in-the-digital-age/.

In this article, Frisch, et al. provide a visual model framework for viewing all of the competing forces that go into making curatorial decisions for oral histories in the digital age. The authors discuss how organizations of various sizes and priorities will weigh each of these factors differently: project management, output management, media management, and collections management. Above all of these factors is the ever present need for software and digital technology. The authors suggest that these four main factors are like the poles of a tent, which are lifted up by software and technology in the center. The model is very useful for visualizing how complex decision making can be in any institution, and that there can be no generalized best practices for making these decisions. This paper will be helpful for visual learners who are curious about how different types of organizations prioritize different sides of the “tent.” The tent analogy is apt, as the authors point out that there is always tension between factors such as collection size and space, or output demands versus staff, similar to how tension holds the poles of a tent together. When it comes to developing best practices for curatorial choices, the authors rightly assert, “it depends,” and that no two tents are alike.

Lambert, D. and Frisch, M.(2012). Meaningful access to audio and video passages: a two-tiered approach for annotation, navigation, and cross-referencing within and across oral history interviews. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/meaningful-access-to-audio-and-video-passages-2/.

This article builds upon the authors’ previous article on content management, giving a practical example of how their new process attempts to create meaningful access to oral history interviews. The authors describe a method of content management that they developed called the Unit/Story Approach, which is a multilayered method of description that acts as both a type of catalog and index. They describe “units” as stretches of time that follow the natural start and end of a question or an anecdote, usually between five and fifteen minutes in length. Units include a written summary that would allow the user to decide if they would like to listen to the full length segment. “Stories” are shorter and can be in the form of a sound bite, quote, or anecdote, and can be created by staff or by users over time. The two-tiered approach is an attempt for complex content to be described with greater accuracy and usability, since specific parts of the interview can be described through multiple layers. It also aids the both the user and the archive by subdividing content into manageable segments rather than an expansive, undivided interview. The authors provide visual examples of how units and stories come together which aid the reader in understanding this innovative concept. This paper provides a concrete solution to the challenges of using traditional cataloging practices with oral histories. The method opens the door for a process that could save archives costly transcription time, while enhancing user experience and engagement.

Mazé, E. A. (2012). Metadata: best practices for oral history access and preservation. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/metadata/.

Mazé delves into the rich topic of metadata and description in her comprehensive paper on metadata best practices in oral history. She goes into great detail to describe types of metadata, reasons for its importance, systems and tools for managing it, and more, while also providing a extensive reading list and bibliography for further learning. Mazé breaks down key components of understanding metadata into clear sections, while always returning to the reasons why metadata can be so useful with digital oral history collections. Among these reasons is that metadata can act as a web connecting interviews to each other, or parts of one interview to another, enabling user access and discovery. The article is full of industry context as well as practical information that a beginner or an advanced practitioner could benefit from. It is most useful for focused learning rather than quick reference, however, due to its thorough examination of the topic. For instance, she examines nine separate metadata systems, describing their origins, as well as how they can be applied to oral history. The information is clear and understandable, but the volume of it could be potentially overwhelming. Overall, her paper can serve as a valuable desk reference source for anyone looking to improve the metadata in their oral history collection.

Shopes, L. (2012). Transcribing oral history in the digital age. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/transcribing-oral-history-in-the-digital-age/.

Given the new technologies available for transcribing audio, and that oral histories can be made readily made online, it seems that it would be easier than ever to provide full transcriptions to accompany online oral history collections. Unfortunately, as evidenced in Shopes’ piece, this is not the case. The reality is that full transcriptions accompanying online oral history interviews are not common, as they require a great deal of time, expertise, or money to contract the work. She describes the many challenges presented with modern transcription software, that they often require more time in editing and are very idiosyncratic. Shopes describes how a “constellation of factors” goes into an archive’s decision whether or not to transcribe their oral history interviews. She examines how six separate oral history projects weighed the factors of collection size, funding, and purpose of their collections. For example, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute has over 52,000 interviews that are searchable online, however, they are not transcribed. This is due largely to the size of the collection but also because of the mission of the foundation, “requiring that [the user] confront an embodied ‘real’ person describing the Holocaust, rather than read words on a page” (Shopes). This paper is not a guide or an instructional piece of writing about transcription, but an analytic piece dissecting the reasons why and how transcription fits into the role of a digital archivist.

Reeves, T. (2012). No one wants the maintenance crew named after them, or preparing material to deposit in the digital age. In D. Boyd, S. Cohen, B. Rakerd, & D. Rehberger (Eds.), Oral history in the digital age. Retrieved from http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/2012/06/no-one-wants-the-maintenance-crew-named-after-them/.

The author describes the title of the paper by stating “most people love to have the building named after them (i.e. collecting interviews). No one wants the maintenance or IT named after them (i.e. curating interviews).” However, without putting energy and resources into the less glamorous side of oral histories, i.e. metadata and preservation, historic gems may never see the light of day. To achieve the goal of accessibility, early collaboration between the interviewer and the archivist is crucial. Often, they are even the same person, and the earlier the process of description can begin, the sooner the interviews can be accessed by the public. This article can serve as a practical guide for communication between creators and curators, as well as a general overview of what metadata is and why it matters. The author clearly delineates three categories of metadata that can begin to be captured before the creation of the interview: technical, content related, and about the creator. This information is crucial for the future discoverability of the materials, and carefully planning can insure that this rich history can be accessed decades to come.