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Dimension of Digital Oral History Projects: Questions to Consider
- 1. Dimensions of Digital Oral History Projects Questions to Consider Justin Wadland Associate Director Head, Digital Scholarship Program University of Washington Tacoma Library jwadland@uw.edu May 10, 2018 University of Puget Sound Digital Humanities/ Makerspace Event
- 2. Primary Dimensions Image credit: Foddrell Brothers Being Interviewed, October 20, 1980, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc953486/ Image Credit: William Hartley in Library, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https:texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc953525/ Interview Archive
- 3. Goals of Presentation: ● Raise questions to guide process of conceiving and engaging in digital oral history projects. ● Offer some of my own experiences as I have I worked through these questions. ● Leave time at end for discussion.
- 4. Background: Tacoma Community History Project Screenshot of Tacoma Community History Project homepage: https://content.lib.washington.edu/tacomacommweb/index.html
- 5. Background: UW Tacoma Founding Stories Photo of Professor Charles Williams talking with Professor Emeritus Claudia Gorbman, post oral history interview
- 6. What is the scope and vision of your project? ● What relationship will the project have to the community it is documenting? ● Who are the key stakeholders? ● How involved will the community be involved in the project? ● What other projects have you see that serve as models? ● Will the project be integrated into a class and involve students as co- creators? [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 7. Who will perform the labor (or major activities) of the oral history project? Typical tasks include (and are not limited to): ● Conceiving of project scope and managing it ● Conducting interviews and associated background research ● Transcribing and indexing the oral history interviews ● Managing, converting, and preserving digital recordings and files [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 8. Major tasks (cont.) ● Determining rights and permissions agreements and managing them ● Developing digital collection and metadata schema ● Description of individual oral histories ● Contextualization of interviews and audience engagement ● Long-term preservation of files [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 9. In what format (audio or video) will the interviews be recorded? ● What equipment do you have access to? ● What implications will choices have on work and long-term access? ● What other kinds of multimedia do you want to include with the interview? [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 10. What digital repository platform will you use? What are its strengths and limitations? ● Institutionally-supported programs (CONTENTdm, Digital Commons) vs. freely available tools (YouTube, Sound Cloud)? ● What levels of descriptive metadata and indexing/access does the system provide? (E.g. Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 11. What kinds of permission do you want to request from interviewee? [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging] ● How do you want to manage expectations for the project? ● What are the ethical considerations of the group being interviewed? ● Must the project go through institutional review board (IRB) process? ● How will the interviews be used beyond digital collection? ● What kinds of usage rights do you want associated with each interview?
- 12. How do you want to prepare for each interview? ● What kinds of interviews will you conduct? Will you provide interviewees questions beforehand? ● Recommendation: Create an interviewer “toolkit” that includes: ○ Basic wording describing project ○ Release forms ○ Checklist of activities associated each interview ○ Reminders of “best practices” around conducting interviews [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging]
- 13. [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging] What level of access and description would you like for each oral history? ● What are the limitations and requirements of the digital repository system you’re using? ○ Sample UW Libraries Oral History Metadata Scheme for CONTENTdm ● How will interviews be grouped into meaningful subsets? ● What aspects of the person’s identity will be described in relation to interview?
- 14. [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging] How will you draw and engage new audiences with the oral histories? ● What kinds of contextualization and/or storytelling will occur with the oral histories? ● Will the oral histories be edited and organized into a larger narrative? If so, what platform will you use? ● What relationship will participants have to this project?
- 15. [Conceiving] [Interviewing] [Engaging] What aspects of digital oral history do you want to discuss?
- 16. Resources Getting Started: ● Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History. Third ed. Oxford Oral History Series. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015. ● Oral History in the Digital Age: http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/ ● Digital Omnium: http://digitalomnium.com Tacoma Community History Project ● Online collection: https://content.lib.washington.edu/tacomacommweb ● Libguide: https://guides.lib.uw.edu/tacoma/tias515-thist437 ● Blog: http://blogs.uw.edu/tchp
- 17. Resources (cont.) Tools: ● Transcribe: https://transcribe.wreally.com/ ● Oral History Metadata Synchronizer: http://www.oralhistoryonline.org ● More available: Doug Boyd’s “Oral History Digital Toolbox”: http://digitalomnium.com/oral-history-digital-toolbox-my-favorites/ Selected Model Projects ● Densho: http://densho.org/ ● OSU Sesquicentennial Oral History Project: http://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/oh150
- 18. Credits Images/icons not otherwise note: ● Photo of microphone connected to smartphone, courtesy albersHeinemann, found on https://pixabay.com/en/smartphone-mobile-reporting-video- 2758475/ ● Lightbulb, microphone, and network icons by Gregor Cresnar from https://www.flaticon.com/packs/bubbly-element-collection
Editor's Notes
- At most basic basic, oral history is a recorded conversation, structured around questions that elicit the lived experiences of an interviewee. These interviews are then transcribed and made accessible along with other interviews and are made accessible through some kind of repository. Ubiquity of digital tools and platforms makes the prospect of conducting oral history project quite attractive. It changes the dynamic significantly, shifting to the possibility of projects without formal institutional support. Yet some of the same issues apply however you conceive project. Presentation will take a broader view of oral history and affordances made available with digital tools and draw from my own experience working on digital oral history projects
- Rather than offering advice and speak about what has worked for me, I would like to structure this presentation almost like an interview and pose questions for you to consider as if you were planning or involved in a digital oral history project. Appreciate opportunity to speak but do not present myself as “expert” -- this work has been one aspect of my job -- but hope to facilitate an informed discussion. Will leave time at the end for discussion, but feel free to raise questions as I go.
- Tacoma Community History Project A collection of over 80 oral histories with individuals primarily in Tacoma and South Puget Sound region. A diversity of voices represented in the collection--includes projects on prominent civic leaders, labor unions, religious organizations, the military, but it is particularly strong in documenting the history of local ethnic and tribal communities. The oral histories created by students in class that has been taught since 1992 on the UW Tacoma campus by Professor Michael Honey. Student learn methods of conducting oral histories, then research and create their own oral history project. At end of quarter, students donate their project to the Library. Became actively involved with project in 2010 when Dr. Honey received grant funds from the Puyallup Tribe to digitize the oral history projects. Embarked on a process of doing this and were able to digitize many of the projects. Going forward, I began to provide the students guidance in how to create born-digital projects that would more easily be included in the collection.
- UW Tacoma Founding Stories During this past year began working on my own oral history project in collaboration with Charles Williams. Many of the founding faculty members of our campus have retired or are approaching retirement. Dr. Williams wanted to begin interviewing them, and we began this project last year with the support of some grant and endowment funds to explore the founding and development of our campus. This project is drawing upon my experience of working with TCHP, but focused more on a thematic set of interviews. Comment Rather than dive into the logistics of each project, I’d like now to discuss the larger questions and will occasionally touch on how we worked through them. Will give high level view of projects, and at end of presentation, we can go back and dig into any particular area that you’d like to discuss more.
- Not necessarily sequential, but ones that should be worked through iteratively. Yet broken down into three categories for simplicity. As we go through these, you’ll notice that we spend a lot of time in conceiving. Personally, I think that the more time you can spend in this phase, the more successful the project will be overall. All of these questions focus on the organizing principle of the project. Before you consider technology, rights, etc., it seems essential to have a clearly articulated mission for the project. A note about integrating oral histories into classes: reading book “Using DH in Classroom” by Battershill and Ross, and they describe a spectrum of DH activities that could be integrated into the classroom from “light” to “heavy.” Digital oral histories are “heavy” and time and resource-intensive. If you’re looking lighter approaches, perhaps you could design assignments around interacting with and evaluating existing projects. Also, important ethical questions around labor when involving students, which leads us to:
- By no means a comprehensive list, but this reflects my experience of doing oral history project. Another associated question underlying this: What kinds of funding do you have to support the project? Grant funds are not necessary, but will the labor come out allocations of existing staff lines? The more clearly articulated these things are up-front, the more successful the project will be and avoid bottlenecks that could occur through miscommunication. For instance, when I began working on TCHP, the first thing I did was draw up an MOU with Dr. Honey. Sometimes this comes through process of writing grant. If not, perhaps you might consider a project charter. Run through list but emphasize the work of transcribing interviews. Generally considered 2-3 hours for each interview. There is not yet AI that can speed this up, but there are some tools that can make it a little more effective.
- Running through all of these quickly because I will touch on these at more length later on.
- Quality of smartphone recorders increasing every day, but there are important issues about sound quality, fidelity, and consistency of recording that come into play. If working on individual project, may work. Many journalists use phone for recording. For UW Tacoma Founding Stories project, we opted to purchased OH/DS kits that can be checked out by faculty members. The benefit of this is that we can make high quality, consistent records in a non-proprietary format. Another big questions to consider is whether you want to have audio or video recording. Real benefits of seeing people, but video introduces large files.
- This is another big question to consider. To my knowledge, there has not been a digital repository platform that is specifically designed for oral history projects. What this means is that these platforms must often be adapted to fit requirements for oral history and there may be trade-offs for access. Also, at times you lose potential audience engagement if digital repository platform doesn’t easily allow users to easily interact with interviews. Decisions about platform will also influence how you can describe, organize, and present the oral histories. Will note that I recently learned about Oral History Metadata Synchronizer, developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. It is a tool for indexing audio and video files, allowing users to go to specific segments of interviews. Haven’t yet had a chance to implement it, but it is something worth exploring.
- Ah, rights and permissions. This is something best worked through in consultation with whomever will receive the oral histories. Also ties back to original vision of project. Many guidebooks and websites have sample deeds of gift you can use. Discuss a little bit of what was done with TCHP: Variety of forms used over the years and decided that ultimately we would put any projects online that had a signed release form. Going forward, we follow this policy and emphasize that projects must include signed release form.
- Discussion of “life-story” interviews vs. profile interviews vs. narrative interviews. Tool kit is very helpful to provide for interviewees. Checklist ensures consistency across interviews.
- Each system has its limitations and requirements, some determined by software itself, other times by the organization. (e.g. Metadata Implementation Group) Description determines findability, but also website may want to permit browsing of interviews. What are the groupings that you want to provide? How will these be represented in the metadata? Another important thing to consider is the person’s identity and the relationship to the oral history. Want to avoid labelling people and best to align with the oral history itself.
- Another important component that a digital project must consider, one I’m only now appreciating. Interviews provide raw materials of history--what kinds of larger connections do you want to make? Will they part of larger analysis? Will they be published in book? Edited into larger narrative? Story of incorporating blog into TCHP.