This week\u2019s thinkers \u2013 Alessandro Portelli, Allan Nevins, Louis Starr, and Rick Halpern \u2013 framed for me three big questions in the field of oral history. The first question concerns preservation and the technologies inherent to the study of oral history. The second question concerns posterity of oral history methodology in historical scholarship. The third concerns the players in oral history – mainly the interviewer in conducting the oral history interviews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oral history, according to its symbolic father Allan Nevins, \u201cwas born of modern invention and technology.\u201d (p. 30). Modern telecommunication advances, for example, reduced the need for written records and eliminated troves of historical documents for future historians. Fewer diaries and correspondences necessitated other tools for extracting historical information, like oral histories. The advent of portable recording devices in the 1960s bolstered oral history\u2019s popularity, according to Nevins\u2019 acolyte Louis Starr, but also facilitated a debate over preservation strategy: tape vs. transcript. Starr estimated about 70 percent of oral history centers around the world transcribed recorded oral interviews into typeset by 1977. This practice ensures the oral author verifies \u201cthe result, correcting the text for clarity and accuracy rather than for style.\u201d Tape supporters argue vocal nuances \u201cmust be heard rather than left to the reader to infer from a transcript, which cannot accurately convey accent, inflection, emphasis, or manner.\u201d (p. 42). Alessandro Portelli echoes this when discussing what he calls the \u201c\u2018velocity\u2019 of narration: that is, the ratio between the duration of the events described and the duration of the narration.\u201d Subjects may \u201crecount in a few words experiences which lasted a long time, or dwell at length on brief episodes.\u201d These linguistic or rhetorical \u201coscillations are significant [as] dwelling on an episode may be a way of stressing its importance, but also a strategy to distract attentions from other, more delicate points.\u201d (p. 49). Narrative velocity and meaning are linked. As humans are social creatures, evolutionarily attuned to changes in tone or pitch, the audio record is critical to interpretation. Audio files may contain verbal nuance, but they are uncontextualized and raw. A quality oral historian conducts background research on the interviewee and divulges that research to future researchers in notes. Supporters of transcripts believe this assurance of verification vital in elevating \u201cwhat might be dismissed as hearsay into a document that has much of the standing of a legal deposition.\u201d Authorial tone can \u201cbe conveyed by style [and] its frequency immaterial to the research\u2019s purpose.\u201d (p. 43).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This debate makes me question oral history\u2019s future. Under Moore\u2019s Law, preservation technologies rapidly update and outpace previous modes, especially with planned obsolescence. How will oral history progress and archives keep up, when what defines oral history is preservation? Nevins lamented the persistent problem in the development of oral history was \u201cthe difficulty of finance.\u201d (p. 32). Echoing Nevins, Starr reiterates oral history \u201chas been chronically underfinanced\u201d since its official beginnings. (p. 53). Starr clarifies previous revenue streams came from major university programs funneling donations from outside public and private sources. Greater attacks on higher education today, however, evaporate these streams and jeopardize future efforts at preservation upgrades. What else, then, may help popularize and save oral history, to preserve it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maybe that solution rests in oral history\u2019s players, like the interviewer. A \u201ccourageous interviewer,\u201d Nevins postulates, \u201cwho has mastered a background of facts [with] the nerve to press [into] delicate tissues\u201d can produce an oral history that gets \u201cat more of the truth than [a written] autobiography.\u201d (p. 37). Rick Halpern illustrates the impact courageous oral historians can have. Historians like Tamara Harevan, Randolph Langenbach, Alice Lynd, Peter Friedlander and many more utilize oral history in their scholarship to \u201cuncover a history of previously neglected struggle within the ranks of organized labor itself\u201d to establish \u201cnew relationships with working-class communities\u201d and empower \u201cworking people by involving them in the writing of their own histories.\u201d (p. 596). At the risk of messianism, a courageous and discerning oral historian can employ oral histories to build relationships and add to the historical record by spotlighting subterranean histories or hidden cultural transcripts. The Slave Narrative Collection, serving as one of the most enduring and noteworthy achievements of the WPA, exemplifies this potential. The interviews in this collection \u201cconstitute an illuminating and invaluable source of data about antebellum and post-Emancipation Southern life, the institution of slavery, and, most important, the reactions and perspectives of those who had been enslaved.\u201d (Library of Congress<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, they must also contend with how they influence the narrative. \u201cOral sources are not objective,\u201d Portelli states, as their content \u201cdepends largely on what the interviewer puts into the terms of questions, dialogue, and personal relationship.\u201d (pgs. 53-4). Oral historians become part of the story, and their choices become more apparent, which unnerves many historians trained to cultivate objectivity (to the best of their ability) by removing themselves from the story. To overcome this, Portelli encourages a change in mindset and an accepting of it. \u201cOral history changes the writing of history [where] the narrator is now pulled into the narrative and becomes part of the story,\u201d at which time \u201chistorians must allow the sources to enter the tale with their autonomous discourse.\u201d (p. 57). Once that acceptance takes hold, more historians may feel comfortable utilizing it in their scholarship and audiences will see how necessary oral history is to historical scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/p>\n\n\n\n An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives: Articles and Essays: Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938: Digital Collections: Library of Congress. https:\/\/www.loc.gov\/collections\/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938\/articles-and-essays\/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Halpern, Rick. \u201cOral History and Labor History: A Historiographic Assessment after Twenty-FiveYears.\u201d The Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (1998): 596\u2013610.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevis, Allan. \u201cOral History: How and Why It was Born.\u201d Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, Altamira Press, 1996, 29-38.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Portelli, Alessandro. \u201cWhat Makes Oral History Different.\u201d In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, State University of New York Press, 1991, 45\u201358.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starr, Louis. \u201cOral History.\u201d Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, Altamira Press, 1996, 39\u201361.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week\u2019s thinkers \u2013 Alessandro Portelli, Allan Nevins, Louis Starr, and Rick Halpern \u2013 framed for me three big questions in the field of oral history. The first question concerns preservation and the technologies inherent to the study of oral history. The second question concerns posterity of oral history methodology in historical scholarship. The third … <\/p>\n