Abstract
Thirty years ago, digital technology for oral history was in the “Baby Waiting Room” of most oral history programs, and the Internet wasn’t even a twinkle in the eye of the pioneering parents who would make it a universal portal to information. At the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), we stumbled onto digital technology for oral history under the false assumption that it would save us money and personnel in the long run, since retrieval, access, and storage could theoretically be done automatically, without human labor. In 1987, the university was going through one of its economic cutbacks, and the Oral History Program was on the chopping block. A graduate student, Felix Vogt, initiated the research that led to an Apple Library of Tomorrow Grant, and that funding provided the necessary equipment to explore digitization. This was the undertaking that would become Project Jukebox. Our first actual developer was Dan Grahek, and his work was premiered at the 1991 meeting of the Oral History Association (OHA) in Salt Lake City. A dinosaur by today’s standards, that standalone station may have been the first time a digital presentation was given at OHA.
Typical archival institutions are delivering oral history collections online using repository systems that fail to accommodate oral history’s complex, multidimensional nature.
—Doug Boyd 1
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Notes
Doug Boyd, “Enhancing OHMS, Enhancing Access to Oral History,” Digital Omnium, June 3, 2014, http://digitalomnium.com/enhancing-ohms-enhancing-access-to-oral-history/.
Willa Baum, “The Other Uses of Oral History,” in Sharing Alaska’s Oral History, ed. William Schneider (Fairbanks, AK: Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1983), 38–39;
Donald Ritchie, Doing Oral History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 1.
William Schneider, “Interviewing in Cross-Cultural Settings,” in The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, ed. Donald Ritchie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 51.
Richard Nelson, “The Elusiveness of Words,” in Sharing Alaska’s Oral History, ed. William Schneider (Fairbanks, AK: Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1983), 18–19.
A fuller discussion of the speech is provided in William Schneider,... So They Understand: Cultural Issues in Oral History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002), 3–7.
William Schneider, Living with Stories: Telling, Re-Telling, and Remembering (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 7–10.
Carolyn Hamilton, “Living by Fluidity: Oral Histories, Material Custodies, and the Politics of Preservation” (paper presented at the international conference Words and Voices: Critical Practices of Orality in Africa and African Studies, Bellagio Study and Conference Centre, Italy, February 24–28, 1997).
Sherna Gluck, “The Representation of Politics and the Politics of Representation: Historicizing Palestinian Women’s Narratives,” in Living with Stories: Telling, Re-Telling, and Remembering, ed. William Schneider (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2008), 137.
Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.
Alan Dundes, “Texture, Text, and Context,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, 28 (1964): 251–265.
Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 19 (1990): 59–88.
Ronald Grele, “Review of Oral History Theory, by Lynn Abrams,” Oral History Review, 38 (2) (2011): 355.
James Fogerty, “Oral History and Archives: Documenting Context,” in Handbook of Oral History, ed. Thomas Charlton, Lois Myers, and Rebecca Sharpless (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2006), 211.
Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008).
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Public and Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).
Carrie Nobel Kline, “Giving it Back: Creating Conversations to Interpret Community Oral History,” Oral History Review, 23 (1) (1996): 19–40.
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© 2014 Douglas A. Boyd and Mary A. Larson
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Schneider, W. (2014). Oral History in the Age of Digital Possibilities. In: Boyd, D.A., Larson, M.A. (eds) Oral History and Digital Humanities. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322029_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137322029_2
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