“Think forward or get left behind” has become a catchphrase for grappling with fast-moving changes in digital technology. For oral historians, more compact and affordable digital audio and video recorders produce better quality recordings and offer new streams of possibilities for using their interviews and returning them to the communities where they were conducted. But technological advances have made older equipment obsolete, jeopardizing investments and complicating the long-term preservation of interview collections. Technology can even veer in a different direction between the beginning and end of a project, no matter how careful the advance planning. In such a technologically driven field as oral history, practitioners who are caught unprepared will fall behind.
All of these changes also complicate the task of writing an oral history manual. The first edition of Doing Oral History appeared in 1995, designed to fill the need for an up-to-date, user-friendly guide to collecting, preserving, and disseminating oral history. I had considered editing a volume with multiple contributors, but that opened the possibility of receiving conflicting advice. Since oral history is a dialogue, I sought to create a conversation with the reader. Having conducted many oral history workshops, I drew from the issues and problems people had raised, which this book replicates in a question-and-answer format that moves from the general to the specific.
By the time the second edition appeared in 2003, the digital revolution had arrived. In the 1990s, oral historians still talked about the “tape and transcript.” Tape began to disappear so quickly that references to “taping” had to be changed to “recording.” A new generation of interviewers had never used a reel-to-reel or cassette recorders and puzzled over terms such as “fast forward.” Technological changes made even recent equipment seem quaint. The minidisk recorder, initially touted by the experts, was speedily surpassed. The use of oral history for exhibits and heritage touring leaped from cassettes and compact disks to QR codes and smartphone apps. Project directors needed to think clearly about the long-term use of the equipment in which they were investing. Oral historians were just too small a segment of the consuming public to shape the market or to set standards for archival-quality recordings. Instead, it proved advisable to “follow the music,” on the reasonable assumption that whatever technology became most favored for music distribution would prevail on the market the longest.
As oral historians grew more comfortable with new equipment, they expanded into video recording of oral histories and discovered the endless possibilities of posting interviews, transcripts, and recordings on the Internet, for worldwide distribution. Having found a way to get oral history off the archival shelves and into the community, oral historians also had to consider the ethical and legal issues of exposing interviewees to greater public scrutiny. Practitioners began raising new concerns and sharing responses not only at conferences and workshops but also through the oral history listserv, H-OralHist, a part of the Humanities & Social Sciences Online initiative H-Net. I have been following those messages closely to determine what new questions were being asked, and how best to answer them.
The Internet has left us no excuses for parochialism. As the practice of oral history grew more international, manuals could neither address themselves to a single nation nor ignore the rest of the world. Every second year the International Oral History Association meets in a different location around the globe, drawing hundreds of practitioners from every continent. Wherever social, political, or economic turmoil has occurred, oral histories have recorded the change—because state archives tend to reflect the old regimes. The collapse of the Soviet Union spurred oral history projects across Russia and eastern Europe. The economic transformation of China, India, and other nations had a similar impact in Asia. The end of apartheid in South Africa unleashed new interview projects because oral historians realized that their George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons were still living. Challenges to undemocratic regimes in Latin America and the Middle East spurred efforts to record and preserve protestors’ memories and experiences. Internationally, oral history also gave greater voice to those who had been marginalized in historical narratives, ranging from Native, Aboriginal, and First Nation voices, to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community.
War, terrorism, hurricanes, floods, fires, pandemics, and other natural and human-made disasters spurred oral historians to interview those who endured trauma and tragedy, and required interviewers to adjust their approaches. Issues of empathy for those suffering emotional distress increasingly became part of the discourse among oral historians. At the same time, the use of interviewing grew more interdisciplinary, with historians examining the fieldwork techniques and needs of social scientists, and social scientists evaluating the benefits of qualitative research. New theoretical interests developed, particularly surrounding memory studies. Oral historians became more concerned about not only what people remembered but also what they forgot, and how they expressed these memories.
In addition to the expanded movement to collect oral histories, recent years have seen a burst of creative uses of interviews, in teaching strategies, performances, exhibits, and websites. It is now possible to listen to, view, or read interviews from around the world without the time and cost of traveling to distant archives. Video interviews have proved particularly compelling on the Internet, attracting more viewers and encouraging projects to shift from audio to video. Webcams permit face-to-face interviews to be conducted virtually by means of free Internet services. Presentations at oral history meetings have reflected an endless variety of new applications of oral history, while also raising some caveats. Video preservation consumes a great deal of storage space; Internet viewers tend to move on after a few minutes of watching clips and rarely show the same sustained interest that serious researchers have in scrutinizing the entire interview. The endless possibilities need to be balanced with practical realities.
An increasingly litigious culture has raised other concerns for oral historians. Lawsuits have alleged that some online interviews are defamatory. A court case with international implications arose when the United States supported British police efforts to subpoena closed interviews that might shed light on a murder case in Northern Ireland. Oral historians monitored the case carefully to see how it might affect their promises of confidentiality. Other challenges have arisen from the inconsistent behavior of university-based institutional review boards, which have caused headaches for academic projects.
All of these issues made the need for a third edition clear. In preparing this volume, it has been breathtaking to document the scope of change over the last two decades and sobering to see how dated it made much of the past information and even some of the language. A new edition provides a chance to step back and view the impressive new panorama, to jettison obsolete references, and to update the discussions of still-relevant concerns. Looking back over the past two decades has also provided some reassurance about continuity. While it sometimes seems that everything about the practice of oral history has changed, the personal dynamics of conducting an interview have remained very much intact. Whether sitting down face-to-face or using some means of electronic communication, the basic human interaction of the interview has stayed the same. So have the basic steps: the interviewer’s need for prior research; for knowing how to operate the equipment; for crafting thoughtful, open-ended questions; for establishing rapport; for listening carefully and following up with further questions; and for doing everything possible to elicit candid and substantive responses. The need for standards in doing oral history has also remained constant, encouraging the Oral History Association to update its recommendations for best practices.
I have tracked the ongoing discussions among oral historians in the publications of the Oral History Association, the British Oral History Society, and the International Oral History Association; and attended oral history conferences across the United States and in Great Britain, Sweden, Italy, the Czech Republic, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Australia. Although the subjects of the presentations in these diverse places were usually locally based, oral historians everywhere share common methods and techniques. I also edited The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2011), which brought together the original writings of forty authors from five continents. I have learned much from each of them, and have tapped some of their insights for this edition.
Universally, we encounter the tendency of oral history to confound rather than to confirm our assumptions, confronting us with conflicting viewpoints and encouraging us to examine events from multiple perspectives. Oral history’s value derives not from resisting the unexpected but from relishing it. By adding an ever-wider range of voices to the story, oral history does not simplify the historical narrative but makes it more complex—and more interesting.
Trying to fathom oral history, a friend once said: “Oh, you do that vocal history.” That was half right. Oral history thrives on talking, largely by the interviewee. The interviewer’s job is to ask meaningful questions, listen carefully, and suppress the urge to talk. Having disciplined themselves to be silent during interviews, oral historians behave much more loquaciously when they gather at professional conferences. The truth is that oral historians love to talk. As the only historians who deal exclusively with the living, they have to be convivial enough to establish rapport with interviewees, to put them at ease, and encourage candor. Practitioners of the craft of posing questions, oral historians also find themselves constantly questioning their own concepts, methods, and applications of new technology. Those who collect the voices of history make their own voices heard on how to do and use oral history.
The real impact of the oral history movement may not be fully realized until well into the future. Seeking evidence from contemporary figures, researchers do not always need to wait for archival oral history collections to release interviews. Armed with their own recorders, they can question whoever is willing to answer. But as generations pass and participants in historic events are no longer living, future researchers will have to depend on what earlier interviews collected, processed, and deposited in archives. How will they judge our work? Will today’s oral history shape the writing of the history of our time or be dismissed as superficial and superfluous? How much of what we do will be preserved, and how much will be lost? Oral historians need to look beyond their own immediate needs to consider the corpus of work they will leave for the future.
There is no shortage of interviewing manuals and fieldwork guides. They reflect the many disciples that employ interviewing techniques and differ according to the standards, practices, and technology at the time they were written and the backgrounds and interests of their authors. Historians, archivists, librarians, folklorists, anthropologists, educators, journalists, linguists, and gerontologists have contributed to the burgeoning literature. This book draws from that body of scholarship as well as from my personal experience. As a historian, I use interviews as part of my own research, and conduct an archival oral history program for the U.S. Senate Historical Office.
Not every oral historian will agree with every point made here, since there is no uniform way of doing oral history, and unconventional approaches may sometimes work well. The best practices have been established for good reasons, but for every rule there has been an exception that worked. Oral historians welcome innovation and imagination. Rather than seek to make all interviewers march like soldiers in cadence, this book aims to help practitioners first think carefully about what they are doing and be aware of potential consequences. The questions and answers that follow deal with so many principles and potential pitfalls that they may intimidate some beginning oral historians. Do not let awareness of the issues paralyze the process. Oral history interviewing may not be easy, but it can be enormously satisfying and rewarding to meet and engage in dialogue with memorable individuals and to make sure that otherwise neglected aspects of the past will be preserved for the future.
Most oral historians learn by doing, and our understanding of the theories of interviewing and our interpretation have more often followed than preceded our interviewing. Doing Oral History seeks to provide practical advice and reasonable explanations for those planning to conduct and collect oral history interviews. Its emphasis is on doing. Planning is essential for the success of an oral history project, but I have seen project directors fret for years without actually conducting any interviews. They worried about raising money, about what types of questions would be legitimate, about whom to interview, and additional problems that other projects were capable of solving. My recommendation is always to stop worrying and actually do some interviews. Projects can begin small and grow as funds become available and personnel gain experience. Finishing just one interview gives a project something tangible to show for its efforts, something to present to funders and to use as a mode for volunteer interviewers. Even a poor interview offers mistakes from which a project can learn. Lengthy deliberations and delays run the risk that desired interviewees will die before they can be interviewed, for oral historians are in a perpetual contest with the actuarial realities.
Because the costs of doing oral history vary widely and the technology associated with it changes rapidly, this book does not give estimates for operating budgets, such as the cost per hour for interviewing or transcribing, nor does it endorse particular equipment. Anything so specific would become out-of-date almost upon publication. Readers planning to launch an oral history project would be better advised to contact other projects in their locality for cost estimates and equipment recommendations. There are also no mechanical descriptions here of how recorders and cameras work, since the author boasts no mechanical skill other than being able to turn on a recorder and check periodically to make sure it is functioning properly. Nor should this volume be taken for a cookbook of recipes that specify the precise measurements of ingredients and instructions to guarantee satisfying results. Instead, it offers a wide-ranging discussion of the methods of oral history, with notes, a bibliography, and web resources that can lead those with specific queries to more specialized sources.
Each chapter presents a different role related to oral history: starting a project, doing interviews, processing interviews, using interviews in independent research, videotaping, preserving interviews in libraries and archives, teaching, and presenting the material to the public. Few oral historians are involved in all of those phases, and most will specialize only in some aspects. Rather than confine themselves to a single niche, however, readers should examine the complexity of oral history. Interviewers need to understand thoroughly what archivists want from the process, and vice versa. Teachers and students should consider aspects of public presentation, and audio interviewers should have at least some curiosity about video. The various chapters offer glimpses of each area and suggest further reading and websites.
Aiming for clarity and conciseness, this book is intended as an introduction to oral history or a refresher that summarizes current issues and cites the many articles and books that delve into those issues in greater depth. Wherever possible, it includes those individual epiphanies, insights, mishaps, and learned lessons of different practitioners, from an array of projects, disciplines, and nations, that serve as examples of what we can do and what we should avoid. They remind us that there is no one single way of doing oral history, because our procedures and interpretations are constantly evolving.
More useful than any written sources have been the oral historians with whom I have talked and shared experiences over the years. So many have become great friends that oral history conferences around the world have come to resemble family reunions. My personal list is far too long to acknowledge individually, so I extend my heartfelt appreciation collectively. I especially want to thank Nancy Toff, my able editor at Oxford University Press (herself an oral historian); the editors of the Oxford Oral History Series, Todd Moye, Kathy Nasstrom, and Rob Perks; video specialist Brien Williams; and oral history’s ready legal advisor, John Neuenschwander. As always, this book is dedicated to my wife, Anne Ritchie, an archivist and oral historian for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, whose companionship, advice, and keen memory I rely upon more each day.