Tag Archives: Academia

OHD_BLG_0065 New words among other things

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Readings:

Community archives and the health of the internet by Andrew Prescott

Steering Clear of the Rocks: A Look at the Current State of Oral History Ethics in the Digital Age by Mary Larson

Sometimes I feel like we are in the trenches with our machine guns and old military tactics…

This ain’t for you

People live their lives in very specific ways. They have certain rituals and values that they hold very close to their hearts. However it is very unlikely that everyone else in the world has the same approach to life as you do. Some people do not use the right tea towel in my opinion, some people think it is perfectly fine to wear socks in sandals, and some people a zero problems with eating meat everyday. In the case of Prescott’s paper on community archives/Facebook groups we have an academic freaking out because a community is not archiving properly something which he considers to be a great sin, and yes, in a certain way it is a great shame that a community archive is not sustainable because of the platform used or the limited funding. This is especially the case when you come from an oral history angle where one really wants to preserve the voices of those who current fall outside of history. However, maybe we need to remove the academic lens in these situations, maybe these archives just aren’t for you. They have a different, more temporary, function to bring people together over a shared history. They are about sharing history not preserving history like archives do.

This is where I think I (as an academic 🤢) feel that my role is not to impose my beliefs onto these make-do archives but instead build better tools to support them. A community archive on Facebook is a different beast to the university backed oral history project. Truly it is a shame that this knowledge might go missing, but then I suggest that we get more minorities to work in academia rather than dictate what we think they should do.

It’s a power thing.

Anonymity is anti-oral history ?

…, anonymity is antithetical to the goals of oral history if there are no exacerbating risk factors.

Mary Larson

Anonymity, accountability, freedom of speech, privacy, welcome to the 21st century. There is the opinion within the field of oral history that anonymity is against the principles of oral history. This is mostly because oral history demands a high level of context in its reuse, which makes complete sense. However does that mean that all information should be available? Is it impossible to have different levels of anonymity?

It seems odd that currently when it comes to privacy we have to work in such absolutes. You can get a certain level of privacy on the internet but that often requires lots of digging around and downloading plugins that send out white noise. You basically have to spend time fending off those who run the platforms you use, which when put in a AFK context would be the equivalent of the shop keeper pickpocketing you while you were shopping. Currently privacy and anonymity equals not using either the internet or archives, which defeats the point.

Why is this our only option?

Well, in my opinion it is not. We just need to get a bit more creative for example:

  • Use pseudonyms
  • Use other identifiers e.g. White, young adult, middle class, female (that’s me)
  • Use identifiers + 𝓲𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷. There are loads of researchers who have to use their imagination because history has not been good at recording their subject
  • Only allow access to certain information if you either visit the BAM archive or ask for permission
  • Generally encourage more thorough and ethical reuse and research

New words

To elaborate on that last point we currently approach the ethics around archiving from the donating angle; if everything is correctly archived now there will definitely be no more problems in the future. This attitude I do not find very sustainable because attitudes towards ethics change all the time. So instead I purpose a different angle: ethical reuse of archival material lies predominantly with the reuser not the donator. This is where I would also like to insert the ‘new’ words. Instead of using the terms ethical and ethics we instead use responsibility and care, because the former is so slippery so ‘high-level’ thinking that it loses its meaning while the latter are more human words. Responsibility and care are concepts that you teach your children. They are more instinctive. So what I wish for is more care and responsibility from those who reuse oral histories. I want the reuser to remember the human-ness of the archive and the responsibility they have to care for their other humans.

NOTE: this is why I love the idea of archival ghosts so much because it gives the oral histories a face.

OHD_BLG_0077 RE-MIX (reading group – 16/02/21)

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Readings:

M. Frisch – “Three Dimensions and More: Oral History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method” in Handbook of Emergent Methods

J. Bornat et al. – “Don’t mix race with specialty”: Interviewing South Asian Overseas-Trained Geriatricians (this was the wrong piece but we went with it)

Bornat piece

The Bornat might have been the wrong piece but it definitely showed how complex oral histories are. The amount of layers that can be found in the interviews that were conducted with the South Asian Geriatricians would make one hell of a cake. It can be said that all of these layers symbolise a different part of someone’s identity and are all viewed through the lens of memory which makes things extra complicated. The way we remember things lives in the present which is often a very different world to the past. This can be especially seen in the language. The language that we used to describe our identity is constantly changing just look at the ‘new’ identities found in LGBTQ+ or the language that movements like the metoo movement or blacklivesmatter have all given us to talk about life and experience.

When we remember things we take this new vocabulary with us, which sometimes clashes with the feelings that we initially had during the event that is being remember. For example, a woman post-metoo might look back a certain incident that she now understands as being sexual harassment but at the time she just put up with it. These two interpretations of the event, the initial one and the post-metoo one can cause all sorts of reactions.

e.g.

  • It couldn’t have been that bad because you are only talking about it now
  • It was bad but you did not know why because you did not have the words to describe it
  • It didn’t matter at the time and you don’t really care about it now but because of all this language you feel you should

Memory is messy especially when dealing with identity because it changes constantly.

Frisch

I am very familiar with the Frisch piece but many in the reading group hadn’t read it before. What was funny to see was how many had the same reaction I did when I first read it: that it was both obvious, innovative and fundamentally frustrating because he does not give any answers.

Because I had already read the Frisch piece some of the things that had been mention were not completely new to me. The ethical difficulties of oral history archives (Graham wondered whether me might be making too much of a fuss.) Digital silver bullets that will rid us of all access problems?

However, the talk around one theme did intrigue me and that was reuse. This theme was triggered by someone asking whether oral histories even get reused now. Turns out oral historians do not really reuse but oral histories are reused in popular culture, especially for World War novels. All this led me to dig up some old thoughts I had on remixing, which I have already written on after one of the NYU lectures I attended. And at the top of the post is the trailer for the exhibition that planted this idea of remixing in my head way back when.

There are strange power dynamics that are interlocked with reuse and remixing. The decision to store something is an incredibly powerful move, mostly because it involves money. The move to store also automatically highlights documents that are not deemed important enough to store. So now you have items that have been declared important and those that are not, all done by a single person or body of power. However, power shifts over time so eventually someone might want to tell a different story, but they can’t rely on what is stored because that does not represent them, so they remix and create a ‘new’ history. This ‘new’ history might be true or it might be completely fabricated but either way it is necessary. Remixing is a power move that in my eyes should not be hindered by power structures, because the previous power structures already declared what was allowed to be kept.

You can also look at this through the academia vs pop culture lens. Andy pointed out that one of the main reasons people go into oral history is because they like talking to people and not necessarily because they like digging through archives. Now one could easily declare that we therefore should not really bother storing oral histories, but people do use them it’s just that oral historians don’t. In many industries you have those who make and those who can’t afford to make so they adapt and modify often paying tribute to the original. It is exactly this that I am building an archive for; not for oral historians but those who want to remix to reuse.