Tag Archives: Reading Group

OHD_BLG_0070 Reading Group – 16/03/21

Readings

Families remembering food: revising secondary data by Peter Jackson et al.

Secondary analysis reflection: some experiences of re-use from an oral history perspective by Joanna Bornat

Dynamic Attitudes

Everyone views the world through their own personal lens and academics are not exempt. If when an academic sets out on their researching journey they already have a vague idea about what they are going to write about. An oral historian will pick people to interview based on this idea and will ask questions that will fulfil this idea. However, many unexpected things can happen during research that causes you to change your attitude, readjust your lens etc. Your mindset evolves with the project and there is nothing you can do to stop it. This is why constant reflection is so important because our thought process is never static.

Reuse is not the issue, its about permissions

To reuse an oral history can be very valuable but because everyone views history through a different lens it is likely that the reuser will have different attitude to the creator. This results in different conclusion to be made from the same source. However, oral histories are set up in a way that makes the source only give permission for the creator’s interpretation and not necessarily the reuser’s. This is why it’s not about the reuse of oral histories, we know that creates value, but the permissions around the new interpretation, the one that was not necessarily agreed on by the source.

Even if the source agreed that their recording is open source the reuser might still feel the need to ask for permission especially if that person is still alive.

Recording for reuse

What this reading group made clear to me was that the particular oral histories I will be recording are solely for reuse. I am not planning on writing any analysis on the content of the recordings I just need to make sure that they can be reused properly. Reuse is my mission. I have no lens to work through. (Only the subconscious ones and the large one where I am super focused on getting ALL information.)

Always reflect

This reflection is not only for the interviewer but also for the interviewee. In the piece about food they end with the conclusion that it is important to get the interviewee to reflect on what they are saying. To encourage them to become active participants in their own historical analysis, instead of it solely being the interviewer being the one who is analysing it. This is better for the power dynamic.

The code

Now I have already started writing a code of practice for the design aspect of this CDA but I have not really thought about what this would be for the oral history side. On reflection the system I am building for this CDA probably should have some type of code that accommodates it. And I believe that a point that was brought up by Graham in the reading group is a good starting. You see he mentioned that on of the oral history collections that was being reused had field notes attached to the recordings that would now be considered very unethical. Now of course these notes are a fabulous source for showing previous scholars attitudes to the method of oral history collection but they probably should not be digitised and on the internet for everyone to find. Graham therefore had them removed from the internet. This made me think that in the process of reusing oral histories there maybe should be the task of also doing ethical checks on the storage. A kind of mutual agreement that all oral historians keep each other in check since ethics is such a nebulous minefield.

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.

OHD_BLG_0089 Reading Group – 19/01/2021

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TOPIC: Oral history training and teaching

Papers read:

“National Education Meets Critical Pedagogy: Teaching Oral History in Turkey” by Leyla Neyzi

“Is Half a Loaf Better than None? Reflections on Oral History Workshops” by Lu Ann Jones

“Embracing the Mess: Reflections on Untidy Oral History Pedagogy” by Anna Sheftel

Interesting talk about reflection and critical thinking about the process of teaching and training oral history.

Teaching .v. Training

The central debate was about training and teaching oral history. The ‘half a loaf’ paper wondered if we distilled oral history too much and whether squishing oral history into a couple hours doesn’t allow for the participants to get into the nitty gritty of it all. Where teaching oral history involves papers, philosophy and critical thinking, training is far more practical. Someone compared training to learning to drive. You learn the basics, then you pass your test and then you only really learn how to drive properly afterwards. How you learn the basics can also be questioned as the majority of training happens in groups and so people often don’t get the chance for any one-to-one work, which can be extremely valuable.

I love a good tool box

Is it ethically OK to ‘train’ people for a couple of hours and then declare them ready to interview or design?

The big thing I took from it all was this parallel between oral history training and the various ‘tools’ and ‘systems’ the design industry offers. These mass produced ideas that are often not tailored to the needs of the situation. This tailoring is offer better through teaching and more time. As Natascha Jen says design is not just a step by step process its a mindset. You cannot teach people a mind set in two days.

But can you give them the tools to create a mindset for oral historys?

Are we too practically focused?

The conclusion was that there was a lack of reflection on the processes used to train people in oral history.

I wrote this many many days later because I have been surprisingly busy, which is why this is rather uninspiring.

OHD_BLG_0101 Reading Group – 20/10/20

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TOPIC: Oral history and the environment

Papers read:

“Drought, Endurance and ‘The Way Things Were’: The Lived Experience of Climate and Climate Change in the Mallee” by Deb Anderson

“Bringing a Hidden Pond to Public Attention: Increasing Impact through Digital Tools” by Anne Valk and Holly Ewald

Overall good, fun papers that everyone agreed with.

Oral history for legislation

Because the topic was environment, the oral history projects outlined in the papers were great examples of how oral history could feed into legislation. The paper by Anderson illustrated how the human experience of climate change makes the issue more tangible for people. Instead of the climate change just being stats and numbers. Valk and Ewald’s project re-engages people with nature but the sustainability and legacy of the project will show its true power.

The future is always better

The writers of the papers and the oral historians in the group seemed to suggest that it is often the case that people talk about the future in a positive sense. It is as if the nostalgia of the past gives people hope for a better future. Which in the case of climate change is remarkable but human’s are strangely optimistic.

Who don’t we interview

I keep finding cases where people wonder about why we do not interview certain people. Oral history is meant to “represent the voice of the people” yet there are still many voices left out. For example in Anderson’s paper she only interviews people who are still in the Mallee and not those who left the Mallee because of the trouble climate change was causes. Similarly I wondered during the reading group on #BLM why people hadn’t interviewed the people who would have been affected by the activism of those who had been interviewed.

It was brought up during the session that there is a lack of oral history projects based on our relationship with nature. We seem very obsessed and busy with industry but less so with nature. Both the papers have projects that are based in the countries where there were indigenous people before the europeans came. These indigenous must have had a relationship with the land before the people being interview and in some cases stories about the nature and land might have been passed down over generations. Why aren’t we recording those.

And finally America is doing something better than us…?

No, not messing up their democracy. But grass roots community oral history projects are more common in America than here. Let’s change that!

OHD_BLG_0109 Reading Group 22/09/2020

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The topic of this reading group was trauma and oral history. The two pieces read were: “Oral History and Trauma: Experiences of sexualised violence under National Socialist persecution” by Helga Amesberger (Austrain) and “Oral history – ‘More dangerous than therapy’ ?: Interviewers’ reflections on recording traumatic or taboo issues” by Wendy Rickhard (who did Creature Comforts).

Event .v. People

A big issue in interviewing people about traumatising events is that you have this tension between the interviewee’s whole life and that key event. Both parties involved come together because of this event but the life of the interviewee is bigger than the single event. Their opinion of the event might have changed over the years and might still change even after the interviews, making the interviews also a single event in that person’s life.

There is also the issue between the traumatising event and the trauma that the person lives with because of the event. On top of that the trauma that these people live with might change and be manipulated by other things in their life and wider society. In the examples in the texts the traumatic events are layered between the taboo of sexual harassment. Which brings me on to the second point.

TABOO!

Taboo topics can become a bit of an obstacle for oral historians, as was discussed during the reading group. When talking about uncomfortable topics you could walking into the situation where you could reenforce the taboo further. By interviewing a person about a taboo subject you are also highlighting it, which is often considered positive however it has the possibility of backfiring. In addition when the interviews are done and the contents is released into the world no longer have control over how people react to the taboo subject.

The Transcribing Problem

This was a fascinating thing that came up in the discussion. It seemed that nearly everyone had experience of having the heaviness of the conversations hit them when they were transcribing the interviews. In fact Graham even said that he gives his transcribers a heads up that they do not have to finish it if they are not comfortable with it. Clearly the re-listening of the interviews opens up this space of realisation of the heaviness of the topic. I just found this to be a very interesting problem everyone was experiencing.

Access

Now this is the part most relevant to my work: what do we do with the tapes? The tapes can offer a whole bunch of problems. Lets say the tapes are available in an archive which can be accessed by anyone and some random person listens to them, what could happen? Well the recording could be taken completely out of context (like an old tweet) and manipulated into something else. The people were experts in their topic and knew exactly what they were talking about but if anyone can access it the recording they might not actually understand what is being said. Having the recordings open to complete interpretation could have extremely damaging consequences.

This only becomes a bigger problem when you make access to these tapes easier like what I want to do. This mostly happens through the use of technology which currently does not have a good reputation in protecting the users.

To end this access issue the group pondered on whether the tapes should be archived at all, only leaving behind the research done by the expert. This protects those who took part in the interview but also leaves a slight emptiness. (but that might mean because then my whole PhD would be pointless.) Maybe the question is not how should we archive but what we should archive.

And finally…

My favourite quote had to be from Rickhard’s text:

“You need to have money to be ethical”

That truly sums up everything. Because if there is anything that I have worked out about oral history is that it is in a constant battle between capturing an ongoing saga and permanent nature of capturing itself.

OHD_BLG_0110 Reading group – 21/07/2020

Articles read:

Mobilising memory: The case of Iraqi Christian diaspora in England by Niveen Kassen and Beyond Individual/ Collective Memory: Women’s Transactive Memories of Food, Family and Conflict by Graham Smith

Kassen’s work was read in order to give feedback to her and Smith’s work was an appropriate partner for the work.

Kassen like me is not from an oral history background and it was clear that because of this some people struggled seeing the work as an oral history paper. It had very little oral history references and Kassen had only conducted group interviews, which is not the clubs favourite. To her, her study was a good opportunity for an oral history project. But it did not stick to the rules. However it started the conversation around one of my favourite oral history topics – Group .v. Individual interviewing.

Kassem’s work, I found illustrated the power of group interviews. The project was based around the collective trauma that the Iraqi Chirstians had experienced and how they, through memory and storytelling were using this to create an identity. These stories and memories are used to write the narrative of remembrance. The group decides how these stories need to remember, which is why oral historians do not always agree with this group method. The group interviews are heavily influenced by performance and group pressure and therefore the stories told are not always true. But the stories are still important because it is what the group wants to tell. It’s their identity.

However, there are pitfalls here. As Graham pointed out a group can start to create a mono-memory. He used the example of the war in Britain being viewed as a moment of British excellence, due to the fact that those still alive were probably young at the time and therefore had more fun than the older generation (especially in the case of women.) We, therefore, need to keep this collective memory in check, keep it updated, and also be reminded of the stories told at the beginning of the memory by those who were closer to the reality.

This however has to happen in all cases of oral history interviews as both a single person or a group cannot represent a whole people.

P.S.

It is important to note that the experience of group interviews is probably more fun and community building than individual interviews. It might be slow but it is more fun.