Introduction
General OH
- Stories, formed by memory and performed in narrative either resonate and engage, are possibly preserved and imprinted in memory, or they go unremembered and are lost to time. History is made up of the stories of humanity, based on fragments preserved in time.
- Historians, folklorists, digital humanists, ethnologists, anthropologists, and archivists of the modern era have utilized an expanding range of technologies to collect preserve, understand, interpret, and retell stories. This book addresses the history of that process within oral history in the United States and examines how it connects with digital humanities scholarship.
- A typical oral history interview contains a massive amount of information— questions, answers, description, reflection, dialogue, laughter, silences, language, culture, worldview—yet, from the researcher’s perspective, oral history’s greatest value is found in the moments.
- The digital revolution has impacted almost every facet of oral history except or its one primary feature—the fact that an interview is still a dialogue, created through the interaction of (at least) two human beings, one with a story to tell, and one who wants to hear it. (6)
Transcription
- [¿Cuál es el rol de las transcripciones y cómo entra en el propósito de la historial oral?] – resulta la modificación de la fuente primaria. Ahondar en pg 3.
- Sobre la transcripción: “the elements of economics with regard to preservation and the usability and reliability debates surrounding transcription continue today. Our personal observations of oral history’s use in the archive over the course of the past two decades support this claim. The transcript, whether in the form of typescript or textual data, is easier and more efficient for a person to navigate, browse, or search. The problems with transcripts remain the fact that they are too expensive to produce on a mass scale, and, quite frankly, they are imperfect representations of the recorded interview.” (3) Audio and video have traditionally been very difficult and expensive to curate in an archival setting.
Technologies
- It was technology from which oral history was born [Es un campo reciente, entonces, en el que el sonido comienza a tener protagonismo como fuente primaria de conocimiento.] By the 1960s, oral history had clearly emerged as a compelling methodology for documenting and understanding the individual in the study of history.
- Through technological advances, the Internet has become a practical way of making recorded sound and video available, opening up a wide range of possibilities or the presentation of material. YouTube, Soundcloud / CONTENTdm, Omeka, Drupal, WordPress / OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) / Curatescape.
- New technologies have also posed concomitant potential threats, including increased vulnerability of narrators, infrastructure obsolescence, and a host of other ethical issues, particularly with heritage collections.
Orality/Aurality
Referentes:
Oral History at Arrowhead: The Proceedings of the First National Colloquium on Oral History,