This week features two selections which help introduce the concept of oral history. Chapter One of Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual briefly defines oral history and summarizes its origins. In addition, Chapter One of Donald A. Ritchie’s Doing Oral History provides a valuable survey of defining characteristics which distinguish oral history from other forms of interview.

“An interview becomes oral history,” according to Ritchie, “only when it has been recorded, processed in some way, made available in an archive, library, or other repository, or reproduced in relatively verbatim form for publication.”

Ritchie’s definition of oral history harmonizes nicely with that of Sommer and Quinlan, who write: “Oral history is primary-source material created in an interview setting with a witness to or a participant in an event or a way of life for the purpose of preserving the information and making it available to others. The term refers both to the process and the interview itself.”

Clapping one’s hands in rhythm while declaring “Process, Process, Process!” playfully expresses the key theme shared by the above scholars. The methods an oral historian uses to prepare for and conduct an interview are as important as the interview itself, if not more so. An interview conducted with improper methods loses value as a primary source. Failure to conduct background research before conducting an interview, for example, can produce incomplete results because the interviewer should never presume infallibility on the part of the interviewee’s memory.

Securing numerous living sources for project interviews is essential because individual people will remember what they think is important, and that may not align with what the interviewer considers important. To illustrate this point, Ritchie highlights Diane Manning’s oral history project interviewing Texan teachers about the transition away from one-room school buildings. White teachers interviewed by Manning hardly ever spoke about non-white students or racial school integration, whereas Black teachers remembered it vividly. If Manning had not cultivated a diverse range of interview subjects, her findings would have been skewed. Once again, the methods are just as important as the interviews, if not more so.

Sommer and Quinlan divide oral history work into two categories: life interviews and project interviews. Life interviews focus on individual subjects and often consist of numerous interviews in order to allow the interviewee enough time and space to recount what amounts of a life story. Project interviews, on the other hand, focus on specific events and should involve multiple interview subjects in order to create a nuanced understanding of the subject event. Ritchie goes a step further by encouraging oral historians to prioritize life interviews when possible, adding that “even individual researchers need to look beyond their immediate interests when interviewing.”

I agree that life interviews represent the fullest and most ambitious use of oral history as a tool, but project interviews strike me as the format an oral historian is much more likely to encounter in the field. In project interviews, there needs to be a balance struck between knowing when to allow an interviewee to meander down memory lane and when to ask a more topic-related question to reel them back in. How best can an oral historian strike that balance?