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OHD_PRS_0300 Iraq Symposium talk

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Archiving and Reusing oral History – a wicked problemDownload

The archiving and reusing of oral history is often dubbed “the deep dark secret” of oral history, because a significant amount of recordings once they have enter long-term storage are not used again. Investigating this issue and trying to come up with solutions has been central to my PhD research, and so I thought it would be helpful to your endeavour if I were to take you through some of my findings. 

The first thing you need to know about archiving and reusing oral history is that it is a multidimensional problem. In design this is often referred to as a “wicked problem”, a term coined by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in their 1973 paper titled, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. The term ‘wicked’ is not in reference to the ethical standing of the problems, but is used to capture the difficult nature of the issue, how it is malignant, vicious, tricky, and aggressive. The area of concern is dynamic and interconnected in ways which makes it hard to create a single perfect solution. It is for this reason some designers prefer to use “situation” and “opportunity” instead of “problem” and “solution” as a way to communicate the continual and reflective work that needs to happen when dealing with such complicated situations as the archiving and reuse of oral history recordings. So why am I telling you what a difficult issue archiving oral history is? Well because setting up an oral history programme will require the storing of recording long-term or short-term and as this “deep dark secret” of oral history is something you are guaranteed to come up against and not recognising the complexity of this wicked problem can as Rittel and Webber write could be morally objectionable. 

However, you have one distinct advantage when tackling this issue of oral history archiving and reuse – you are not starting form scratch. There have been many attempts to solve the deep dark secret of oral history, some more successful than others which is excellent news as the design theorist Victor Papanek writes, “The history of progress is littered with experimental failures.”. 

So to quickly summarise:

  1. This issue of oral history archiving and reuse is a difficult, multidimensional, and dynamic situation
  2. There is a long history which we can learn from

Now as I said there are many dimensions on this situation but through my research I have found some general areas which at good starting points for your consideration: technology, ethics, labour, and money. I am going to quickly explain each of these and show how they are interconnected. 

I am starting with technology because this is the area which often hogs all the attention, which is not surprising, we like the technological fix, it’s sci-fi, it’s the future, it’s a bit magic. But its magic is an illusion, as Willem Schneider acknowledges in his reflection on the oral history reuse technology Project Jukebox. Technology on its own will not solve the wicked problem of oral history reuse. This is generally for two reasons:

  1. Firstly it is constantly and rapidly evolving, and tech companies have built obsolescence into their product making technology not a particular stable area which is not helpful when you are setting up an archive or any form of long-term digital storage.
  2. In addition, the digital world exists as a web of interconnecting systems. Your laptop is made by one company while your software is made by another, and there is another completely different organisation running the internet. If anything happens to one of these systems it is likely to have a ripple effect across the entire networks of interconnected systems. Again this is not a stable environment for long-term storage. 

The big lessons we can learn from historical failures are how technology is not the single route to solving the issue and how its unstable nature is one of the greater challenges of this endeavour. 

However, technology is also where some of the most interesting opportunities lie. This oral history archive will be created in a post-AI world and therefore will be able to explore how this will affect archives. There is also an increasing awareness of the environmental effects of long-term digital storage and how this is a pressing issue in the age of data. 

Next section – Ethics. I have done three different placements for my PhD and in during all of them I was trying to make archival material reusable. I spent those six months not thinking about technology but working on either copyright, data protection, or sensitivity checks. When you are working with oral histories you are dealing with people’s lives, permissions and restrictions have to be in place in order to make it available. And ethics like technology is also always changing. Copyright in the form we know it now was heavily influence by the rise of the internet in the late 20th century. The various data protections laws have only become a thing in the last ten years and definitely will be changing as attitudes change. In addition to this what language and images are deemed socially acceptable is also always changing. The constant evolution of ethics is both a practical challenge and a fantastic research opportunity as this endeavour is working on a very large scale and is a relatively a new geographic area for oral history to be deployed. It is likely setting up the ethics for this project will deliver some new insights into the ethics of oral history archiving in general. 

One of my central conclusion of my PhD is how labour, specifically maintenance labour, is critical to successful innovation in this area. Both the areas of technology and ethics will require maintenance labour because they are these continually evolving areas. When we look at some historical attempts to solve this issue we see that some of the technological solutions fail because they did not account for the maintenance it would require to keep the technology. In the case of ethics evolving, one of placements during my PhD required me to do a copyright audit of a large collection. It turn out that out of 1700 recordings only 400 had the correct copyright, meaning that 1300 recordings were not reusable. This likely happened because no one had checked whether these recordings had the right copyright permissions until I came along. In both instances maintenance and the labour it takes to keep long-time storage was not considered and therefore the innovation collapsed or requires a significant amount of restoration. Restoration is only necessary when maintenance fails. In How Buildings Learn Stuart Brand quotes John Ruskin, “Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. Watch an old building with an anxious care, guard as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation.” This endeavour has the great opportunity to explore methods on how to sustain and maintain innovations, by putting labour in a central position. It can give us insights into how organisation are sustained through institutional memory and create ideas on how technology and humans can synthesise their respective abilities to create better long term storage for archival material. 

Appropriately the overarching area of tension in this complex issue of oral history archiving and reuse is money. If we look at the history of technology driven solution which failed, many eventually collapsed because people were not maintaining it and people were not maintaining it because they were not getting paid. When the money runs out the work stops and it collapses. And therefore you need to know the budget and consider the long-term requirements of running and maintaining an archive. Here again is an opportunity to develop new forms of spending plans that both encourage innovation and support maintenance, something which currently is not standard practice. 

So these four areas are the key starting points to the identifying opportunities to improve the situation around oral history archiving and reuse. Now it is important to note that these are just starting points and each version of the oral history archiving and reuse situation will be different to the next one. Archiving oral history recordings as an small community base project in the country side of England is a different situation to this project and therefore will likely render different opportunities. This is especially the case when you consider how oral history is or be will value within its particular setting. How we value history and historical material will influence how the material is archived and reused. There are many examples with oral history’s legacy where you can clearly see value has shape the project. Certain topics are considered more valuable than others in certain cultures. For example in Europe and the USA the holocaust and the world wars are popular topics for oral history projects. These very intense and heavy topics will bring different ethical issues than lighter topics. Some oral historian’s prefer video recordings over audio recording, another expression of value which will shape the collection. You also have differences in how oral history is valued in relation to other historical materials. Maybe someone uses a photograph in their interview or wishes to record on location, again this will change the set up of collection. All of these decisions will effect what technology might be used, what the ethic forms need to look like, what work needs to be done, where the money can come from. This project needs to understand what it values and how this might shape the project but also how these values might change and how the system will accommodate these changes in value. 

The issue of oral history archiving and reuse is not a banal, tame problem. It is a wicked problem – a mess. But it is also an area of great opportunity where great innovation and insights can be discovered if we do not tame the wicked problem but instead seek to identify opportunities which can improve the situation of oral history archiving and reuse for everyone. 

OHD_PRS_0125 Oral History’s Design: Sustaining visitor (re)use of oral histories on heritage sites

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On 26 March I presented my first paper during a series of Digital Heritage Workshops organised by Lancaster University and IIT Indore. It was really scary and weird. I didn’t feel looked after at all. I also presented something that had already been discussed by previous speakers. Anyway you live and learn.

Script

This is Seaton Delaval Hall. Built in the 1720s the hall and its residents, the ‘Gay Delavals’ became renowned for wild parties and other shenanigans. In 1822 the hall went up in flames severely damaging the property. This history is represented very well in the collection that is housed at the hall which is now run by the National Trust. 

What is less represented is the more recent history. The community that looked after the hall after it burnt it down, when it was a prisoner of war camp during both wars and later when the late Lord Hastings invited the local people to parties after its restoration. 

This history lives within the local community. Luckily we have the wonderful field of oral history that allows us to capture this predominately undocumented history.

However oral history has a deep dark secret. After recordings have been made and analysed, they are locked into an archive or into a historians cupboard and never heard from again. They are like a box of unwatched home videos. 

This in the context of Seaton Delaval hall seems sad as its strength as an institution lies within its deep connection with its surrounding area. It would therefore be a shame if the community who gave these histories cannot access them. I also personally think this to be ethical dubious as the lack of access to these oral histories brings up issues of power inequality where an institution like the National Trust happily takes the oral histories but not giving something in return. 

SO this is the challenge: we want to make oral histories reusable for the visitors of the hall. 

To make the rather complex problem more tangible I have focused in on the idea of sustainability:

I would like to point out here that I am using the term storage system instead of archive because I feel that the idea of the archive is very loaded and cultural represented as not particularly accessible to the masses. 

Let’s start with the visitors and volunteers. This particular group, especially the volunteers, are the people who will contribute and donate their oral histories to the hall. Now because of the standard time and financial constraints the period of recording will not be able to capture all the stories. So this system that will house the the initial recordings needs to be dynamic and sustainable enough for the visitors and volunteers to keep adding and reflecting on the history.

For the staff the term sustainability addresses user friendliness. It needs to be easy for a new staff to learn how the system is use and managed. 

This is where I believe the digital can help. 

The digital as we are all fully aware has the amazing capacity to allow people from across world to upload, download, browse all sorts of content. It’s awesome. Also as time goes on more and more people are getting familiar with the digital sphere. Especially with the pandemic which forced to many use it more. This is not just individuals but also the case for most institutions notably those in the culture sector who have been very busy trying stay afloat by working out how they can use all these digital tools to keep their audience. The digital and its tools have become and are increasingly becoming part of everyday life. 

The dynamic and sustainable requirement of the system, where people can easily add information and stories is pretty covered by basic digital systems. 

The user friendliness can be achieved if the staff are involved right at the beginning with the design of the system. Allowing it to mould to the staff’s digital habits and knowledge.

What the digital can also help the staff with is storage. The digital is able to store documents in also sorts of formats and in all sorts of locations. I personally find that the internets ability to duplicate (think memes) might be a possible tool that could help storage issues but that simultaneously brings up all sorts ethical issues around permissions and copyright. 

However what the digital also has done is created this desperate need to record and store everything and therefore also a huge sense of loss when something isn’t captured. Because as you are able to capture and store something you also create a whole bunch of things that arent captured and therefore lost. Technology has always played a huge role in this, just look at the field of oral history which relies completely on the ability to record someone’s voice. So then the question is should we record everything? Do we need to record everything? It’s tempting when you can record everything. But then you have everything and that is also useless because you cannot reuse everything. One of the archivists at the Parliamentary Archives once told me that they had calculated how long it would take for them and their colleague to digitise everything and it was 120 years. This paradox brings up issues around value. What do we value? Whose voices do we value? But an even bigger problem is what will we value?

This one of the bigger I imagine we will be dealing with in the next couple of years. Trying to keep the digital eco system healthy and not complete collapse under its own weight. 

The digital is still very young. Which is proven by what it can do really enthusiastically like record everything and allow everyone to contribute. But it is also proven by the gaps that has. For example many search functions on online archives are difficult to use and don’t deliver that same serendipitous feeling that brick and mortar archive has. A search bar is not close to being the same as an archivist who knows the collection. Robots are not completely ready to replace humans just yet. For now humans will have to fill in the gaps that the digital has. 

A good example of this blend of human and digital is that people who are unable to do their research because they cannot go into archives or the digitisation of the document they are interested in is not good enough. What I have seen many people do now is use their human network to access these documents by ringing people up and asking them take pictures of documents. I thought this was a funny cyborg-y moment where people needed both technology and a human person to achieve their goal. 

So what we are looking at is how the digital can support the needs of humans at Seaton Delaval Hall by adapting to their needs. But at the same the humans are free and able to fill in these gaps that are present in the digital. 

However there is one more layer I would like to add to this challenge of building a sustainable storage system. And that is the environment. Our environment heavily influences whether we can access archives. A pandemic can shut us off from the brick and mortar archives. A power cut can take down the servers where the digital archive stored. Or an earth quake or storm can destroy both completely. 

This in addition to digital gaps is why I do not believe that it is sustainable to solely relay on either a digital or a brick and mortar storage system. A system that floats between these two worlds and at its centre has the humans that are reason for its existence, that I believe is the closest we might get to having something sustainable. Something that will allow Seaton Delaval Hall and its community continue telling stories for generations to come. 

Slides