Tag Archives: Reuse

OHD_WRT_0273 The Trust: stories of the nation

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With 1700 recordings of radio programmes, oral history interviews, and field recordings, how many stories lie waiting to be uncovered in the National Trust Sound Collection? In May and June 2023 I carried out an access and copyright audit on the National Trust collection held by the British Library. Although I was in search of signed agreements, I was gripped by the stories, the lived experiences, the contradictory emotions and opinions that are held in this collection. They tell the tales of one of the biggest charities in the country and of the country itself.

The most prominent story in the collection originates from a watershed moment in 1946, when institutions could finance the purchase of important cultural property for the nation through the National Land Fund. The National Trust in particular benefited from the scheme, which allowed the handing over of keys and grounds to the Trust instead of paying estate duty. The effects of the National Trust’s ever-expanding portfolio is covered in a song I came across performed on BBC Radio Four by Kit and the Widow in 1992. “Oh, the National Trust” is a satirical song from the perspective of two volunteers, who sing the tale of a Dowager Duchess of a nameless country house going mad as her home is flooded by National Trust visitors. Eventually the Dowager is sold at Christie’s after her harassment of the visitors becomes too much to bare and she needs to be removed from the property. The song ends with the Dowager’s revenge: she returns as a ghost to haunt her former home and the National Trust. The song neatly covers the stereotypes of the National Trust: the displeased landowner, the busy National Trust volunteers selling tea towels and Beatrice Potter books, and of course, a ghost, the natural partner of any self-respecting country house.

This turbulent period of transition from private ownership to a Trust property is both confirmed and challenged by the contents of other recordings. I found a local resident recalling being chased off a public footpath by an angry landowner, mirroring the Dowager Duchess’ antics. Then there is a former estate owner praising the National Trust taking over their houses because by the mid twentieth century: “the houses were falling down all around the place, nobody could see the future.” What prompted – or forced – owners to give up their home is not always covered in great depth: some interviewees mention death duties as the primary reason to offer their property to the National Trust; a desire to preserve ‘our country’s heritage’ crops up occasionally but seems less of a driver.

Kit and the Widow’s song does not mention an important personal consequence of the transition from private to public ownership: how does the change affect the many people employed on the estates? A significant portion of the interviews in the collection are with people who were former maids, gardeners, butlers, cook, valets, housekeepers etc. The collection therefore captures two elements of the transition story: how the land went from private to public property and how this signified the end of a particular ‘upstairs/downstairs’ system of employment.

Among the more ‘Downton Abbey’ tales in the collection there are interviews which record the role of many stately homes during the two world wars. There are interviews with those immediately affected: evacuees, prisoners of war, the land army, the home guard. Many other recordings reference the period. The government requisition of country houses during the wars is an important chapter in the history the nation’s country estates. Although the importance of this is often acknowledged, there is also a lamentation of the state in which the houses were often left. A gentleman points outs to an interviewer that the priceless wooden panelling is littered with holes, caused by the Land Army workers having their dart board there. The stately homes during this period were neither the grand houses of the wealthy owners nor the tourist attractions they are today: reduced to their basic structures, they functioned as prisons, barracks, and army training camps, where work and play all happened under one roof. Sadly, there are significantly fewer recordings with those directly involved in this period and why this is, remains unknown.

The collection shows how the role of the stately home and grand estate changed over the years but it is not just about people, communities, and social structures. The Director General at the time points out during a radio interview to commemorate the centenary of the National Trust in 1995 that the Trust is not just a ‘keeper of country house’, it actually spends most of its conservation effort on the landscape. Indeed, the National Trust is one of the biggest landowners in the country. They are responsible for landscape from the White Cliffs of Dover to the landscape around Stonehenge (although Stonehenge itself is English Heritage). The collection tells us clearly how our attitude to the land has evolved and how nature has changed as a result of human activity. A speaker recalls seeing the Northern Lights in the Clent Hills in the 1930s before light pollution drowned out the stars. Similarly, the relationship between farming and nature conservation is prominently present in the many interviews with farmers and recordings of Trust staff discussing their policies around farming and conservation. Deer hunting crops up time and again, which in the 1990s was still permitted. Folklore plays a prominent part too; the relationship between the land and tales of ancient witchcraft are plentiful. Yet, in spite of the Director General’s wish to turn the focus away from the National Trust as keepers of country houses, there are distinctly fewer recordings connected to the landscape than there are to country houses.

The National Trust stereotype of the Kit and the Widow song is undeniably a prominent part of the collection. However, when one considers this second biggest oral history collection in the British Library, it is difficult not to be impressed by the sheer scale of the institution. The National Trust is one of the biggest landowners and charities in the UK; the number of stories and histories which come under its care are innumerable. And these are exciting and often fundamentally conflicting stories: there is no single story of the National Trust. Recounting the history and significance of the Trust is always a balancing act in which the many layers of history kept by and embodied in the estates needs to be told from different perspectives. A conflict of interest and a struggle for prominence is present in the current collection, but certain questions that are in the public eye today are notably absent. Nobody asks where the money came from, for example. The colonial pasts of these properties appear absent although it would be an interesting research project to comb the archived recordings for references to colonial ties. And so, let me finish with another few suggestions of stories that could be told or investigated in this collection of cassette tapes and WAV files.

There are few recordings post-2000 so there is little discussion or mention of climate change and the effects it is having on the land, the housing and the Trust’s conservation efforts. Yet, is there evidence of changing nature? The stories and experiences of the National Trust volunteers, the corner stone of the National Trust’s work, are not prominent in the wider collection, but notably start appearing in the more recent recordings. Fundraising efforts is another topic that could be traced, for example, the owners throwing ‘medieval banquets’ as a way of making money. Seaton Delaval Hall, the National Trust property in the North East that I investigate as part of my PhD thesis, was well-known for their themed parties and banquets and many visitors to the property reminisce about the ‘wild nights’. Finally, the many interviews with gardeners and landscape architects are begging to be brought together to create a history of the Trust through gardens. After all, the National Trust tops the European charts for the number of gardens under its wings.

Clips

NumberContentCopyright
Recordings referenced in the blog post
C1168/648The song “Oh The National Trust” by Kit and the WidowBBC Radio 4
C1168/144Local resident talking about being chase off a public path by the Duchess of Wimpole EstateNo copyright
C1168/1605Someone talking about Clent HillsNo copyright
C1168/618Duke of Grafton talking about the National Trust saving the crumble country housesNo copyright (But was NT staff)
C1168/1001Land army girl at Sutton HooCopyright
C1168/526NT Director General talking about the CentenaryBBC
C1168/819NT Director General talking about deer huntingBBC Radio 2
Recordings that have copyright and might be good for the blog post
C1168/621Coventry, 11th Lord (Family of property owner (before donation to National Trust))Copyright
C1168/849Cocking, Mary (Between Maid)Copyright
C1168/914Drane, Jim (AWRE Technician)Copyright
C1168/1108EvacueesCopyright

Possible Photos

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Trust_Sign_271.JPG

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Trust_Logo_on_Seatoller_Fell_-_geograph.org.uk_-_3669634.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Trust_sign_on_Finchampstead_Ridges_-_geograph.org.uk_-_4360782.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sign_for_Padley_Gorge_(National_Trust)_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2988974.jpg

OHD_PRS_0259 Learning from ourselves : Reusing institutional oral

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We would like to start by quickly introducing our projects, as we will be using them to illustrate our methodologies. My project is with Seaton Delaval Hall, which is a National Trust heritage site in the North East of England. The land has been in the hands of the Delaval family since 1066 after the Norman conquest. The hall now standing on that land was completed in 1728, it partially burnt down in 1822, was restored after the Second World War and was then given to the National Trust in 2009. The National Trust, set up in 1895, is one of the biggest heritage and conservation charities in the UK and also one of its largest landowners. In a review done in 2020 the National Trust revealed that Seaton Delaval Hall amongst many other properties had connections with the slave trade and other colonial activities. My PhD is looking into how we can reuse oral history recordings on heritage sites and how heritage sites can benefit from reusing oral history recordings beyond the usual collecting of stories.

My project is at the Archives at NCBS which is a collecting centre for the history of science in India situated at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. I want to study the processes of institutional policy making through the lens of gendered safety policies in scientific institutions. I hope to understand the various deliberations and considerations behind policy-making in different areas, through interviews with the stakeholders of institution policy – policy-makers, enforcers, students and staff. Some questions I hope to ask include specific concerns about safety that led to action from scientific institutions, how policy solutions were formulated, debated and enacted, the responses to these actions from persons on campus, and the corroboration and/or dissonance between anxieties of campus occupants and policy. I am aiming to learn more about gender discourses that informed policy, and the feedback to this discourse after their adoption into daily working.

The reason these projects have been brought together for this presentation is firstly due to convenience. We met at Archives at NCBS and then got talking about our projects, which revealed an overlap in our motives within our respective projects, which is reusing oral histories. In particular, we are approaching oral histories from the perspective of the archives. Moreover, while both of us are acting as independent observers, we are doing so on behalf of our respective institutions and our work is deeply embedded within them. Within this context – deeply tied to the institution and to the archive – we found that the  “oral history project” format, i.e. recording oral history and then turning it into a book or exhibition, does not fit the rhythm of either. The institution and the archive aim to work in perpetuity, while the oral history project is often tied to a single moment, and is distinctly linear and terminal. The “oral history project” format simply does not accommodate what we wish to do with institutional memory. So we propose a new method of approaching oral history projects cyclically by recording with the explicit intention of reuse by a different individual at a later date, and reusing with the explicit intention of connecting oral history projects to the history of doing history in the institution. But before we explain our new method we need to understand oral history’s relationship with institutional memory, what it offers as a tool to capture or perhaps not capture when it comes to institutional memory. 

In a 1986 paper on the use of history as an organisational resource, Omar El Sawy, Glenn Gomes and Manolete Gonzalez describe how institutional memory consists of semantic memory – or past learning that has been codified into procedures and processes – and episodic memory – defined by them as the unwritten memories within an organisation of a “repertoire of responses” to various situations that arise in the course of working, held as stories, myths, artefacts by individuals. Organisational or institutional memory – used interchangeably – is therefore defined as “…accumulated equity representing the beliefs and behaviours of organisational members both past and present cumulated over the life of the organisation”.

In our experience, archival records can allow us to trace the histories of policy deliberations. We can know when specific infrastructure, facilities, policies, and even laws were instituted. Through letters, meeting minutes, and personal records we may even find added context. What we lose is an implicit, often commonly understood discourse, that informs the creation and adoption of policies by members of the institution, based on different lived experiences inside and outside the institution over time – basically the intangible memory that El Sawy et. al. termed episodic.

On a basic level, oral histories work to simply fill gaps in knowledge in records –  for instance, at NCBS in the OH catalogue, in an interview with an architect who worked on the construction of the campus, one finds reference to an on-site stone crusher to make jelly for construction that caused the interviewee lung problems due to fine debris. They state that this experience led to the removal of on-site crushers in all future constructions. The memory of this event has been institutionalised as a standard process, without there being a push to preserve the memory itself. Similarly, at Seaton Delaval Hall, through oral history interviews Hannah found information on various maintenance and conservation jobs that had been done over the decades which had not been formally documented. She also found how the management styles of the various general managers of the hall have affected the relationship between the staff and the volunteers. This is particularly important in the National Trust because the sites rely heavily on volunteers to run the sites. 

But oral histories can also contain more abstract information. For instance, at Seaton Delaval Hall, the oral history interviews were able to capture historiography, so how people have talked about certain events over time. This is a possible helpful source to the running of heritage sites and how the staff might develop exhibitions and installations to either match or challenge people’s feelings around certain events or include material and stories which they prioritise or miss out. To give another example from the NCBS catalogue, several interviews refer to a sense of alienation felt between incoming students and the institution. These references can be found across students, faculty and staff, with differing personal explanations for this feeling from all quarters – whether it’s the question of open labs, the creation of departmental silos, or the changing priorities of the student body. This sort of documentation of ‘feeling’ is the unique advantage of oral history as a source – and gives vital information about the individual-institution relationship. 

So we fully champion oral history interviews as a way to capture institutional memory, but we need to remember one of the very important traits of institutional memory, which is how it is distinctly dynamic in nature. In a 2020 monograph, James Corbett argues how institutional memory is more than a collection of facts and figures, and even recollections of events and contexts – it is a narrative about the institution’s wider identity. This narrative Corbett discusses comes from Charlotte Linde’s 2009 monograph, Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. In it she defines institutional memory as “representations of the past” brought into the present by individuals. Because of the nature of the workplace institutional memory is dynamic, because representations of the past change with the people representing it, the purposes for which narratives are created, and the changing circumstances and shape of the institution itself. 

And this is where things start getting complicated, because as we established oral history is good at capturing institutional memory, but the format of the “oral history project” does not lend itself to preserving the dynamic nature of institutional memory. There are several reasons for this, the first being the well-known fact that no one reuses oral history recordings, it is in Michael Frisch’s words “the deep dark secret of oral history”. In reality this is not a secret but more like the very large bright pink elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Oral history recordings rarely get reused when an oral history project ends, which is not why we record oral histories. One of the reasons we wish to record is because they capture the “missing” parts of history, which are important for an institution to reflect on its current trajectory. An example of an oral history project which focused on recording institutional memory but suffered the same fate as every other project was done by the United Nations. The UN did an oral history project titled The United Nations Intellectual History Project or UNIHP to investigate the history of ideas with the UN. It followed a similar format to any other oral history project with the knowledge found in the oral histories published into a several volume book series. Oral history itself is neither finite nor final, and projects like UNIHP – i.e. terminal project that ends by creating a heavy bulk of static knowledge –  build in redundancy by attempting to codify it without factoring in the inherent changeability of narratives in an operative institution. In a paper on UNIHP the reader is pointed toward a website www.unhistory.org, which now will bring you to a Japanese holding website. A further search only turns up a handful of articles and references to the book series. There is no evidence of the recordings being easily accessible today. Historians, like Portelli have discussed a long-time impulse to turn oral history into a written transcript before use, as a way to make such interviews an objective source – but we have far moved past the point where the legitimacy of oral history was in question. Our continued attachment to text-based outcomes has done injustice to the new possibilities offered by oral history.

Within our project we wanted to use oral history to capture institutional memory but the oral history project format misses the dynamism of memory which is so valuable to our understanding of the history of institutions. So we offer an alternative. Instead of the somewhat linear method of recording, making something, likely text-based, from those recordings and then leaving it in an archive to gather dust, we propose a continuous cycle between recording and reusing. In this cycle you record with the primary aim for it to be reused further down the line by someone else and you reuse with the aim to record new material based on what you found in the archived recordings. We believe this cycle can achieve a more integrated culture of oral history instead of having the occasional oral history project. We will take you through the stages more specifically with Hannah discussing how she has recorded oral histories with aim of reuse and then looking at how Soumya reused oral histories with the aim of recording.

Record for reuse

For my project with Seaton Delaval Hall I specifically approached my recording with the question – what will the people who will be reusing want from this? Of course there is no way to really know what they would want in the future. So instead of directly answering the question, I decided to get a better understanding of the community surrounding the hall, their hopes and dreams, and also make sure they knew about my work and what I have to offer by recording oral histories. How I did this materialised in two ways: integrating into the hall’s community and leaving behind as much of my findings as possible. 

I started off simple when integrating into the hall’s community by volunteering as a room guide. I then also did a three month placement where I helped them set up an onsite research room. When it came to recruiting for my oral history project I nearly always had the staff help me find candidates and I have always been transparent about who I am recording. I also started to ask the staff if they had any questions they would like put to the interviewees or whether they were looking to find out something about the history of the hall or the maintenance of the hall. For example, the gardener wanted to know the exact date the rose garden was planted which the old caretaker of the property could answer. I also have been able to work out the location of the old kitchen garden by recording people who had been at the property during the Second World War. I am not suggesting they would not have been able to find this information anywhere else but asking a human is often faster than searching through piles of archival material. I have also been able to capture the various ideas people had for raising money for the hall. These ideas could be helpful for any other property wishing to raise money if they wanted to know what worked and what did not. I hope that by being more visible and collaborating with the staff I make the value of oral history more visible and prove to them how it can help them in their work. 

The second way I am trying to help the people who would be reusing my oral histories is by making sure I leave behind as much information in addition to the recording.This is important because the structure and nature of heritage organisations means there is a lot of staff rotation. Each new staff member has to relearn the history of the hall and neither them nor I will have the time to chat about all what can be found in the oral histories I have recorded. I therefore need to create a document that helps them navigate the oral histories and seek out their value, without it being a hefty transcript. I made a spreadsheet, because nearly everyone can open these on their devices. 

On one sheet we have the oral history recordings breakdown, where I have given a summary of the whole recording, but also broken the recording down into sections I believe might be relevant, because interviews can be studied in the context of a number of themes, which we miss out on if we only stick to the objective of an individual, time-bound project. In addition I gave each section a value tag. The value tags come partially from me, historiography, institutional knowledge, and stories, and also from how the National Trust assigns value to their collection items. These value tags will obviously also change over time, as we alter our perception of what is valuable. This means we are continuously capturing our perception of value within the archive and the institution. In addition, the spreadsheet also contains a sheet with a recruitment plan so anyone is able to continue recording oral histories if they wish to do so. What I wanted to achieve with this spreadsheet is to make an easily searchable document that encourages people to go and listen to the recordings, while also allowing them to easily add and edit the entries if necessary. I believe my insistence on integrating into the Seaton Delaval Hall community and leaving behind as much information as possible besides the recording should help heritage sites integrate oral history into their day-to-day instead of having the occasional “oral history project”. 

Reuse for recording 

To reiterate, my project – on the history of gendered policy making in scientific institutions – began in the course of my internship as an archivist at the Archives at NCBS, which also entailed learning the methodology of oral history interviews. After talking to our artist-in-residence at the time about women’s safety on campus, I became interested in recording oral histories on the topic. I started exploring secondary sources as background work for my project, and found myself relying on past oral history interviews, which made me realise the importance of not creating in a vacuum when it comes to studying institutional memory, eventually culminating in my discussions with Hannah around reusing oral histories.

The plan for the project was initially to record life story interviews with a list of people across various informal interest groups on campus, and across scientific institutions in Bangalore. As with any other project documenting institutional history, my first step was to explore secondary sources. I found the work of Abha Sur, who had discussed CV Raman’s treatment of the women in his lab; and Deepika Sarma, who while writing for the magazine Connect, had explored women’s experience as later entrants into IISc. Both these projects used archival records in combination with oral history interviews they were conducting. I also went to 13 Ways, an exhibition from 2017 put up by the Archives at NCBS, which had a section dealing with gender. 13 Ways was a narrative born out of a catalogue of more than 60 oral history interviews, as well as 600+ archival objects. Having referred to these secondary sources, due diligence required that I track down the primary source, and I was able to gain access to the summaries of the oral history interviews done at NCBS – though not the actual recordings. The oral history interviews had been recorded to document the history of NCBS in 2016. These interviews include both life story interviews and interviews specific to the involvement of individuals with the construction of campus. 

Oral histories have a unique usefulness in histories of gender given the absence of gender in archival records – and in the beginning I was only reusing oral history projects insofar as they bridged this gap of information. But navigating the catalogue as I was planning out my project helped me realise the methodological value of intentional reuse for the purposes of studying institutional memory.

In planning out my interviews, I could not sidestep the problem that in asking direct questions about gender, I would be providing my interviewees a lens through which to view their lives. This was especially problematic as gender is not a neutral lens, especially in the field of science. I’m under no illusions about the subjectivity of oral histories, and the value of documenting narratives regardless. From having read Sur and Sarma’s work, I had realised, however, that my project had a different objective, because I was trying to study gender in the institution over time, instead of how it played out in one specific individual’s life, or one specific moment of time. My project combined gender and institutional history, and as we have established, the study of institutional memory is a collation of individual narratives. I worried that any conclusions I would draw from my interviews would be so fixed within the specific gender discourse of the present, that I would be left with very little scope for generalisation beyond individual experience. 

Reusing oral histories from a past project helps me in three ways: 

Firstly, I was able to find discussions of gender from people who either were completely absent from the archives, or who were generally believed to be unconnected to the issue, for instance, discussions on gender with canteen and security staff. Often overlooked in the processes of decision-making, their involvement in everyday activities on campus as subjects, observers, enactors, and in some cases enforcers, contained reflections on campus culture and power hierarchies that is completely missing from archival record. This led me to include a wider demographic in my interview plans.

Secondly, reusing oral histories lets me understand the events in the past that may or may not have shaped my interviewee’s present perceptions of the issue of gender – which will enable me to ask questions about events instead of themes in my interviews.

The oral history interviews contained information about undocumented events that were well-known on campus which I would have had no idea to even ask about – such as references to a protest and awareness/information campaign against sexual harassment in the immediate neighbourhood of campus by students, a recounting of efforts from students to formally organise into a gender collective that had fallen through, and even additional context around the institution of a shuttle service for people who walked home. In several cases, past interviews recorded the perspectives of persons who are now inaccessible. This kind of background knowledge has helped me plan out interviews such that I have some control and intentionality in where I bring in the specific lens of gender. It will let me ask questions about lived experiences without always having to guide the interviewee towards my theme. In other words it lets me talk about gender without asking about gender. This has the additional benefit of making my interviews more viable for reuse by future researchers, feeding into the cycle of recording and reusing we are proposing.

Finally, reusing the past catalogue allowed me to see the same events and themes discussed from a completely different vantage point, which will let me find patterns in my data and past data in comparison. This will hopefully allow me to construct generalisable knowledge for the institution. Gender exists within the scope of institutional memory, and therefore it is a dynamic and perpetually reshaped discourse. By providing a historiography of gender discourse, reusing past oral history interviews lets me subvert the inherent temporality of interviews to methodologically meet the requirements of studying institutional memory. Simply put, by resisting the urge to create in a vacuum, and locating my project in a continuum of other such projects, I, and researchers who study the institution after me, are better equipped to study the evolution of memory in an institution rather than its instance in a specific moment.

Conclusion

To quickly summarise, oral history is an excellent way to capture institutional memory because it captures the feelings and networks which are not held in archival documents, which motivated us to do our respective projects. However, the format of the oral history project freezes institutional memory into a rather unnatural state since by its nature institutional memory is forever changing and evolving together with the people who make up the organisation, especially as we are dealing with organisations that are still operational. Using our experience of recording and reusing oral history we have been able to explore an alternative to the usual oral history project format. We proposed that when you record oral histories you take in consideration the potential for reuse and so put in labour to make the recordings more accessible for future researchers who could be exploring a variety of themes. We also suggest that when beginning the process of recording oral histories to study institutions, researchers refer back to previous oral history projects and sources to enrich their own understanding and provide deeper and more complex context for their individual themes and lines of questioning. These two approaches, for us, allow us to rethink the concept of oral histories within institutions in a way which makes the process of studying them reiterative, and so complements the dynamic nature of memory in an operating institution, such that we are able to use the methodology of oral histories to its fullest extent.

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Sources:

  1. El Sawy, O. A., Gomes, G. M., & Gonzalez, M. V., 1986. Preserving Institutional Memory: The Management of History as an Organizational Resource. Academy of Management Proceedings, 1986(1), 118–122. doi:10.5465/ambpp.1986.4980227
  2. Emmerij, L., 2005, June. The History of Ideas: An Introduction to the United Nations Intellectual History Project. In Forum for Development Studies (Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 9-20). Taylor & Francis Group.
  3. Frisch, M., 2008. “Three Dimensions and More” in Handbook of Emergent Methods, p.221.
  4. Huxtable, S. et al., 2020. Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery. National Trust: Swindon
  5. Linde, C., 2009. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. United Kingdom: OUP USA.
  6. National Trust., 2023. Seaton Delaval Hall. [Website]. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/seaton-delaval-hall 
  7. Portelli, A., 2009. What Makes Oral History Different. In: Giudice, L.D. (eds) Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101395_2
  8. Sarma, D. 2021, June 21.Women and the Institute. Connect. https://connect.iisc.ac.in/2018/06/women-and-the-institute/
  9. Srinivasan, V., 2017. 13 Ways [Exhibition]. Archives at NCBS, Bengaluru, India. http://stories.archives.ncbs.res.in/exhibit/13ways/
  10. Summaries of oral history interviews, Oral history collection at Archives at NCBS. http://catalogue.archives.ncbs.res.in/repositories/2/resources/14
  11. Sur, A., 2001. Dispersed Radiance Women Scientists in C. V. Raman’s Laboratory. Meridians, 1(2), 95–127. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338457
  12. Weiss, T.G. and Carayannis, T., 2005, June. Ideas matter: voices from the United Nations. In Forum for Development Studies (Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 243-274). Taylor & Francis Group.

OHD_DSF_0240 Heritage Surrogates after climate disaster

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Hello welcome. My name is Hannah and today I want to take you through a couple fo examples of how our surrogates collection has helped us recreate heritage in times of great loss. 

Just for those who do not know our surrogate collection is a collection of metadata that describes a material object or site and its context. The data in the surrogate collection is groups of information like, photographs, measurements, scans of maps, descriptions, and even oral history recordings. Our initial motivation to collect this information was because certain items we were interested in would come up for auction and in some cases we would be unable to acquire it and it would end up in a private collection. The thought was that if we had enough surrogate information and this information was store a safe and secure location we might be able to recreate certain objects if we needed to. The later also started to include items that were being treated by decay or mould or we simply could no longer look after properly because of budget cuts. After storm Humboldt which significantly damage the collection of a property in the south and the lost of cliff house a year later the institute decided to up the surrogate collection policy by getting sites to actively think about which collection items might be at risk and then even more ambitious act of creating surrogates for whole sites in some cases. This also led to an increase in oral histories being recorded as part of the surrogate scheme. 

Moving on to our examples…

My first example is this bench which is a replica of a bench that was burnt during a fire caused by a severe drought we had a couple of years ago. The file on this bench in the surrogate collection had a couple of photographs but most importantly it had an oral history and some literature from the person who made the bench because they used particular techniques that are not very common knowledge. 

The second development is one of our more recent project, which comes from the surrogate file on Seaton Sluice. The village no longer exists because after significant storms throughout the late 2020s it was deemed a unsafe space to live. At the time we collected maps, oral histories and photographs. 

For the anniversary of the final resident leaving the village we commissioned a group of artists to create an audio visual experience to give an impression of Seaton Sluice before we lost it. We sifted through the surrogate data, the maps, photographs and recordings, and did a public call out for anyone who might have any material linked to the village, which led us to record new oral histories. 

From this material two visual artists and sound artist created this beautiful map of Seaton Sluice which visually showed the different eras of the village and then on the map you had links to different audio clips. These audio varied between soundscapes, music and oral histories often mixing them together. In addition because we had so much archival material we also a creative writing student make a collection of short stories about Seaton Sluice, this was an extra thing visitors could buy. This project only week live a week ago so we have not yet had time to gather or evaluate feedback. 

My last example it probably our most successful application of the surrogate collection, our local history storytellers. This does what it says on the tin. Storytellers go round visiting pubs, village halls and schools etc. telling stories of the local history. These stories are specifically about things in our surrogate collections because these are the things people do not have access to via museums or archives. We found that the surrogate collection is not used a lot by the public, so we wanted to do develop something that is a little more accessible and ended up with the storytellers. They have been great success. We are in our second year now and we have ten different storytelling programmes around the country and we are currently looking to add two new locations. People have said about the storytellers that they find it very engaging way to tell history and many have also commented on the pleasantness of the evenings and find them very relaxing. The schools similarly enjoy the storytellers. One of my favourite quotes came from Thomas, at St Mary’s Primary School saying, “I was going to go dressed up as Harry Potter for Book Day but now I am definitely going to go as Johnny the stable boy.” 

So these are just three examples of what we are currently doing with our surrogate collection but we have many more in the pipeline and hope that we are able to do more as people become more aware of the collection and its potentail. 

OHD_DSF_0238 Oral history project retention table

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Title of item Item typeBrief DescriptionRetention Condition
SDH_PP_001_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Part of the Research Group. Some memory of the hall before the National Trust.File to be kept for 25 years and then destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 25 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 15 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_002_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall staff member. Discusses the COVID-19 pandemic and the Curtain Rises restoration project.File to be kept for 30 years and then destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 15 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_003_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of previous resident of Seaton Delaval Hall. Lived at the hall from 1947 to 2018.File to be kept for 40 years and then destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_004_AUDIOWAVAuto-oral history recording of PhD student memories of Seaton Delaval Hall. The student is the interviewer in the other SDH_PP recordings.File to be kept for 20 years and then transcribed and the audio is destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 20 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 10 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_005_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Possibly the first National Trust volunteer. Discusses the fundraising for acquisition and the hall before the National Trust. File to be kept for 20 years and then destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 20 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 10 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_006_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer.  Discusses the fundraising for acquisition and the hall before the National Trust. Also mentions activist work in local surrounding villages.  File to be kept for 25 years and then destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 25 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 15 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_007_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of a person who lived in Seaton Delaval during the war and remembers walking past the Seaton Delaval Hall to Seaton Sluice.File to be kept for 20 years and then transcribed and the audio is destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 20 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 10 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_008_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of a person who did a variety of jobs at Seaton Delaval Hall both before and after the National Trust this included working in the market garden and architectural jobs.  File to be kept for 30 years and then transcribed and the audio is destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 15 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_009_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of the eight vicar of the Seaton Delaval parish telling tales of the Church of Our Lady on the Seaton Delaval Hall property.  File to be kept for 40 years and then transcribed and the audio is destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_010_AUDIOWAVOral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Discusses a lot of the fundraising for acquisition and research into the hall.File to be kept for 20 years and then transcribed and the audio is destroyed. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than five times OR use in a publication, exhibition or similar within the 20 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 10 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_001_TRANSCRIPTPDFTranscript of oral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Part of the Research Group. Some memory of the hall before the National Trust.File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_002_TRANSCRIPTPDFTranscript of oral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall staff member. Discusses the COVID-19 pandemic and the Curtain Rises restoration project.File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_003_TRANSCRIPTPDFTranscript of oral history recording of previous resident of Seaton Delaval Hall. Lived at the hall from 1947 to 2018.File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_004_SUMMARYPDFSummary of auto-oral history recording of PhD student memories of Seaton Delaval Hall. The student is the interviewer in the other SDH_PP recordings.File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_005_TRANSCRIPTPDFTranscript of oral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Possibly the first National Trust volunteer. Discusses the fundraising for acquisition and the hall before the National Trust. File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_006_TRANSCRIPTPDFTranscript of oral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer.  Discusses the fundraising for acquisition and the hall before the National Trust. Also mentions activist work in local surrounding villages.  File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_007_SUMMARYPDFSummary of oral history recording of a person who lived in Seaton Delaval during the war and remembers walking past the Seaton Delaval Hall to Seaton Sluice.File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_008_SUMMARYPDFSummary of oral history recording of a person who did a variety of jobs at Seaton Delaval Hall both before and after the National Trust this included working in the market garden and architectural jobs.  File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_009_SUMMARYPDFSummary of oral history recording of the eight vicar of the Seaton Delaval parish telling tales of the Church of Our Lady on the Seaton Delaval Hall property.  File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_010_SUMMARYPDFSummary of oral history recording of Seaton Delaval Hall volunteer. Discusses a lot of the fundraising for acquisition and research into the hall.File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_METADATAPDFSpreadsheet of the SDH_PP oral history recordings’ metadata, includes interview length, location, equipment, and tags. File to be kept for 30 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 30 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 
SDH_PP_PROJECT_SUMMARYPDFDocument by the SDH_PP interview on the project. Includes a brief summary on process and their reflection on the project. File to be kept for 40 years and then printed off. UNLESS accessed and listened to more than ten times within the 40 year retention period. If so retention is extended by another 20 years and then reviewed. 

OHD_DSF_0183 Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant

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Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant

The National Trust looks after one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of art and heritage objects set within their historic context. As ideas around heritage change enveloping not only the tangible but intangible heritage. We realise our duty of care extends beyond objects to the non-physical heritage such as folklore, traditions, and language that make our sights so unique. In addition we recognise the increasing amount of born digital material that will one day become the heritage of the future. We are therefore looking for a person to help us collect, manage, and curate the intangible and digital heritage of our sites in the region.

We expect this person to be experienced in collecting, managing and curating intangible heritage such as oral histories and be confident in their digital skills.

What it’s like to work here

The National Trust Consultancy is home to specialists in every field of our work. It’s a place where resources are shared across disciplines and boundaries, and it’s a great repository of skills, talent and experience. The diversity and quality of expertise within the Consultancy enable our properties and places to benefit from creative and innovative thinking, as well as deep expertise in all matters relating to our twin purpose of caring for the nation’s heritage and landscapes and making these accessible to all. The Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant role sits within the Consultancy.

What you’ll be doing

You will be advising sites on their collecting and managing of intangible and digital heritage, supporting them during their intangible heritage projects and organising the collection of object metadata for surrogate collections. You will work between regional IT and the sites to ensure the needs of sites are considered, while simultaneously ensuring IT is able to keep a secure and stable digital infrastructure. You will also manage relationships with third party archives, to help guarantee access to material for staff and volunteers.

You will also provide tactical and strategic advice to the sites on how move modern opperation files to the archive, while also ensuring sites adhere to the National Trust policies around climate friendly storage. 

Who we’re looking for

  • excellent communications skills: verbal, written and presenting
  • developing and delivering an internal communication (or similar) strategy and plan
  • proven experience of communicating appropriately with a wide range of colleagues in different roles
  • being a brilliant networker and influencer
  • great project management skills, ideally including some experience of event management
  • extensive experience of successfully managing diverse and varied workloads with tight timeframes and budgets
  • being an excellent multi-tasker and self-starter
  • excellent IT skills, including a good working knowledge of Microsoft, Sharepoint

Update meeting on Intangible and Digital heritage at Seaton Delaval Hall

26/09/2028     

13:00

Seaton Delaval Hall

Participants

General Manager

Regional Curator

Project Lead

Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant

Agenda

Introduction

Status Update

Discussion Topic 1: Dialect dictionary

Discussion Topic 2: Auction Items

Decision 1: Film Archive

Agenda for next meeting

Summary

Everything is ready to go with Storyland. Three institutional oral history recordings taken. Student project for a dialect dictionary is on track. Possibly will lose out on Garden Painting at Auction but metadata collected. Need to revisit somethings in Film Archive arrangement.

  1. Institutional Oral History
    1. Interview done with retiring cafe staff member
    1. Interview done with Gardening volunteer and Research group volunteer
      1. Possible follow up needed for gardening volunteer
      1. Not got copyright yet from research group volunteer
    1. Need to organise Oral history sessions with recent student project
  • Storyland
    • Everything is ready for 1st October
    • Food trucks have been booked
    • Storyteller was asking for some extra tickets
  • Dialect dictionary
    • Student has managed to get funding for archive visits
    • Need to grant access to on site oral history recordings
    • Need to find illustrator
      • Rainham used a good illustrator
  • Auction items
    • Mahogany chairs
      • Photographer has been arranged
      • Curator says likely to win chairs
    • Garden Painting
      • Unlikely to win
      • Meta-data already been collected
  • Film Archive
    • IT very enthusiastic
    • Do we want to donate all material?
      • Unsure about footage taken by volunteer
    • Another meeting with General manager and Intangible and Digital Heritage Consultant
  • Agenda for next meeting
    • Update on Film archive
    • Oral history interviews with students secured
    • Progress on Dialect Dictionary
    • Summer project 2029
    • Adaptive release plan

Decisions

DecisionNotes
Dialect Dictionary IllustratorUsing the illustrator Rainham
Donating (some) items to Film ArchiveDefinitely happy to donate some material but unsure about some footage take by volunteer.

Actions

ActionPersonDeadline
Contact students for Oral History interviewProject LeadWithin the next three months
Check with interviewer of gardening volunteer if they think another interview is requiredGeneral ManagerAs soon as possible
Send extra tickets to storytellerProject LeadBy the end of the week
Talk to volunteer about archiving film footageGeneral ManagerBefore meeting with film archive
Arrange another meeting with film archiveIntangible and Digital Heritage Consultant  Within a month

OHD_WRT_0135 The Journey of Oral History Technologies

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In Back to the Future Part Two, Marty McFly travels to 2015. There are flying cars, holograms, hoverboards, and many many fax machines, but no sign of the internet or smart phones. It is easy for twenty-first century viewers of the film to roll their eyes at this past portrayal of the future, because we are blessed with hindsight. These technologies have so seamlessly integrated into our lives, we cannot imagine a world without the internet or smart phones. People who have been able to perfectly predict future technologies are in a significant minority. The majority of portrayals of the future either have been or will be proven incorrect. This principle can be transferred onto the real world, where people spend their time developing technologies in the hope that it will become the future only for it to miserably fail. Artistic interpretations of the future and experimental future technologies are kindred spirits fuelled by great hope and excitement. In the early 1990s one of the first oral history technologies was born in Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — Project Jukebox. According to a paper on this digital oral history archive, “a fantastic jump into space age technology awaits the user when he or she sits down before the Jukebox workstation.” (Lake, p. 30) This “space age” technology involved a lot of CD-roms and received support from Apple Computer Inc. (their words not mine) through their Apple Library of Tomorrow scheme. In the papers written on Project Jukebox there is this wonderful sense of hope that technology will solve the problem with reusing oral histories, but like Back to the Future Part Two hindsight makes us shake our heads at talk of CDs. The discussion around copyright is especially alien to 2021 readers as it focuses solely on the copyright of the photographs in the archive, with little to nothing on the copyright of the recordings and no mention of the interviewees’ privacy. (Smith, p. 19) In the first chapter of the book Oral History and the Digital Humanities, Willem Schneider, who was one of the original creators of Project Jukebox acknowledges their hopeful naivety: “we stumbled onto digital technology for oral history under the false assumption that it would save us money and personnel in the long run.” (p. 19) This does not mean that Project Jukebox was a failure, on the contrary, it plays an essential role at the start of the journey of oral history technology. The naive exploration of future technologies is the first stage of all journeys that aim to find a technology that becomes as everyday as the smart phone.

However, the journey from naive exploration of future technologies to seamlessly integrated technologies is a bumpy ride. It is really hard to establish a technology in society. It takes a lot of work and time, and above all — money. In the following essay I am going to look at the journey of digital oral history technologies. I would not be writing this if there already was an established digital oral history technology but, we are also no longer in the naive exploration stage that Project Jukebox started. We are somewhere in the middle, which in my opinion is the hardest place to be: no longer in the fun, playful, and hopeful beginning stages, but still quite a way off a solution. I therefore am not going to talk about which digital oral history technology is the most user-friendly. I believe it would be very unproductive to pit these technologies against each other, instead I want to discuss what I believe contributes to the struggle of establishing a solid oral history technology.

I must confess that the research I had to do for this essay was not the easiest. Not only do many of the oral history technologies no longer exist but there is minimal literature on why they stopped existing. I have a folder filled with papers and articles all on the topic of digital solutions in oral history archiving and reuse. There are many hyperlinks in these documents, some even have QR codes, sadly the majority of them are dead links. I can probably count the amount of links that do work on my fingers, which is not great when you are doing research. From my limited research on these technologies I have however been able to extract a handful of factors that play contribute to the bumpy journey of developing oral history technologies, including the usual suspect — money. But first we need to understand what happens to our storage and preservation systems when we introduce digital technologies.

Tech = Risk = Maintenance = Money

In my house there are several types of analogue storage units: bookshelves, cupboards, drawers etc. If I put a book on a shelf it stays there unless I move it or some uncivilised person decides to remove it without my permission. It is possible I might forget which shelf I put it on and have to spend some time searching for it, desperately trying to remember if I had lend it to somebody. In this scenario in order to preserve, store, and access the book I need nothing more than a shelf to keep it safe, and my brain to remember where it is. This is a pretty stable situation as the shelf does not move and my brain currently functioning fine (touch wood). Now I have found my book I want to put some background tunes on while I read. I get my electronic device (laptop or smart phone); press away the notification that I need to do an operating systems update; realise it has no battery so have to plug it in the mains, after locating my charge; and then finally open my Apple Music application (formally iTunes) and play the song. I might even connect my device to a bluetooth speaker so that the sound is better quality. Here there are a couple more steps and players involved in the storing, preserving and accessing of my song than in comparison with my book on the shelf, but as long as I have the hardware, software, power supply I have access.

However, it is the twenty-first century so nothing actually happens unless you post it on social media. I capture this moment of me reading my book and listening to my music by again using hardware, software, and power supply, but to upload the image onto the storage space of social media several more actors come into play. Firstly, I need WiFi, which is supported by a very complicated infrastructure of towers and wires. Secondly, I need the appropriate social media application, which is supported by a separate infrastructure of towers, wires, and servers. Both these infrastructures rely on a huge power supply to function. If there is any disruption in the internet supply or at the social media servers I cannot store or access my images on my social media profile and can therefore not prove that I read books.

With this narration I wanted to illustrate what happens when we introduce digital technologies to our storage and access systems. I find that there is a direct correlation between the amount of technology needed to store, preserve and access stuff, and the potential risks associated with that same system. In order to avoid these potential risks more maintenance is required, which in turn means that more money is needed to keep everything running smoothly. Doug Boyd, who is the Director of the Louie B. Nunn Centre for Oral History at the University of Kentucky, has experienced how the lack of acknowledgment of the rise in risk, maintenance, and money due to an increase digital technology can be the downfall of an oral history technology. Boyd worked on the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database, which in his words was a “gorgeous” website that had “logical” information architecture.  However, Boyd also admits that the project was intensely focused on the userbility of the site and actually was more akin to a “complex, elaborate, and beautiful digital [exhibit]” than a digital oral history archive. (2014, p. 89) This user-centric design of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database, meant that the archiving perspective fell by the wayside. There was minimal consideration for the maintenance required to keep all this digital technology running smoothly, and the money needed to sustain this maintenance. Boyd admits that it eventually led to the website being “digitally abandoned, opened up to online hackers and eventually taken down.” (2014, p. 90) The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database is an example of the naive experimentation that happens at the beginning of the technological journey. We learn from these experiences and move on, which is exactly what Boyd went on to do.

Growing Pains

The Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) was developed by Boyd after his work on the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database. It still exists, which is quite an achievement. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database OHMS is not a repository but a software that individuals can use to make their repository better. There are two parts to OHMS, the Synchronizer, where the user creates the metadata for the oral history recording and, the Viewer, which makes it easy for others to access and search the oral history recording. (2013, p. 97) When it comes to the amount of digital technology involved in OHMS compared to the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database, I cannot say for sure whether it is more or less because I simply do not know enough about their set up. Either way, both are web based, so it is likely to be a considerable amount and definitely more than my bookshelf. Boyd is therefore still battling with the high amount of maintenance, luckily though he is now more aware of it. In a 2013 article he reflected on OHMS’ original shortcomings: its heavy reliance on transcripts and the struggle to expand it beyond the Kentucky Digital Library.

It is well known that text is a lot more searchable than audio files. This is one of the founding ideas of OHMS as it connects up the audio/video file with a transcript. However, not all oral histories have transcripts because they are expensive to make: only big institutions with huge amounts of funding could afford transcribing all the oral history recordings. (2013, p. 99) This is a good example of how technology dictates the amount of money and work needed. OHMS’ technology needed transcripts to work, but this requires a lot of work and money, making the system a very exclusive product. Boyd, however, went back to the drawing board and, inspired by Michael Frisch’s ideas around indexing, altered OHMS to be able to also run off indexes. Indexing involves a lot less work which means it is cheaper. (2013, p.100) The technology also does not suffer because indexing is text based. The quick text searches which was the foundation of the original OHMS design can still be run.

When it comes to the issue of moving OHMS beyond the Kentucky Digital Library Boyd’s has a little less to write in his 2013 paper. (2013, p. 105) I find the tone in this section similar to the Project Jukebox papers; filled with hopes and goals for the future. There is a hint of awareness that the road is rough ahead, OHMS is open source which Boyd admits “does not always mean free or simple”. However, the following to me is the stand out hope:

The hope is that smaller historical societies or similar organizations with very limited budgets and almost no IT support can take full advantage of the OHMS system for presenting oral history collections online. (2013, p. 105)

This to me feels like a very distant future. These technological solutions, Project Jukebox, the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database, OHMS, have all been developed and used within universities which have relatively high (although not enough) access to funding opportunities. But I also do not believe that money is the only barrier to achieving Boyd’s dream. I have suspicion that “limited IT support” is a barrier that is higher than we think.

DIY Digital

Computers are magical. They can do really amazing things. However just like a hammer or a paint brush this magic can only be unlocked by a skilled user. Computers are after all no more than very complicated tools. Their complicated nature has sadly resulted in only a select group of people (mostly men) fully understanding the ins and outs of these tools. This discrepancy between those who do understand computers and those who do not is referred to as the “digital divide”, a termed coined in United States during 1990s. The digital divide refers to the differing levels of access to hardware, software, and the internet. Professor of Communication Science at the University of Twente, Jan A. G. M. Van Dijk explains in his 2017 paper, Digital Divide: Impact of Access, how in the early 2000s the main focus of the research into the digital divide was on digital infrastructure and access to physical devices and the internet (p. 1). In recent years the idea of access has been broadened to include the skills needed to access and retrive information and increasingly, the skills needed to communicate through various mediums, and create content. The reason for this expansion is because digital inequalities did not disappear in places where there was unilateral physical access to digital technologies. Van Dijk believes that digital inequality only truly starts after digital media had become defused into our everyday lives (p. 2). He splits the digital divide into three types of access: physical, skills, and usage. I will be focusing on the latter two and the divide that occurs after physical access has been achieve.

The access granted by skills can be view from two directions: the creator and the user. I would like to start by looking at how skills can facilitate access in the former and then look at skills and usage from the perspective of the user. Willem Schneider writes that there are three main roles in oral history preservation: the oral historian, the collection manager, and the information technology specialist. If we consider the things I talked about in the previous section, the preservation of the oral history relies increasingly heavily on the skills of the information technology specialist, especially when things are moved online. They are the ones who have to handle the risks and maintenance of the digital technology involved in the project. Their computer and digital skills directly influences and limits the preservation and access of the oral history recording.

In the case of Stories Matter the person taking on this role was Jacques Langlois. Stories Matter started as a in-house database software created at the Centre of Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal. In the abstract of an article on the development of the software, Stories Matter is described as a programme that “encourages a shift away from transcription, enabling oral historians to continue to interact with their interviews in an efficient manner without compromising the greater life history context of their interviewees”. (Jessee, Zembrzycki, High, p. 1) Jacques Langlois was the software engineer from Kamicode software, who mostly had experience in developing video games and no experience with oral history. (Jessee, Zembrzycki, High, p. 5) As a software engineer Langlois has a higher level of digital skills in comparison to the rest of the team working on the software. There was a clear digital divide between the rest of the team and Langlois. This only expanded when Langlois decided to use the the runtime platform Adobe Air, which the rest of the development team had little to no knowledge of and therefore were unable to support Langlois in his development. (Jessee, Zembrzycki, High, p. 6) How the individual team members approached the development of the software was also a result of their in-team digital divide. The oral historians viewed the software as something made for oral historians by oral historians and were primarily focused on userbility, which as I previously discussed was something Boyd has noted as the downfall of the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database. Meanwhile Langlois simply wanted to make sure that the software did not crash and ran smoothly. The digital divide in the team and the pressures on Langlois are perfectly illustrated in the article on the programme through a frustrating bug finding saga. (Jessee, Zembrzycki, High, p. 9)

As far as I can tell Stories Matter no longer exists. The majority of the links in the article on the software are dead and, although Stories Matter does have a page on the Kamicode software website, I am unable to download it. As I mentioned in the first section of this paper building an application software and keeping that sustainable and updated takes up an insane amount of money, labour, and time. You cannot just make an application and hope that it lasts forever because it will not. Technology is constantly evolving; new devices are developed and the operating systems are constantly updated by their own developers.

When it comes to the user side of oral history technologies I would like to start by highlighting that the majority of the time oral historians do not use bespoke oral history software. In a paper on the now non-existent InterClipper software Douglas Lambert and Michael Frisch identify a couple of “caveats” when it comes to their use of technology. When reflecting on the 1990s cyber punk roots of the digital age they admit that a do-it-yourself mentality of “rummaging around in our virtual toolbox” instead of “waiting for the “perfect software” or a single methodology to resolve the complex challenges of oral history practice in the digital age” is often a cheaper, quicker, and more effective way of analysing oral histories (p. 142). This does not mean that oral historians should adopt an exclusively DIY approach and give up making a more appropriate oral history software. However, I do believe that maybe reflecting a bit more on the tools we already use and searching within the parameters of our own digital skills, we might save some time and money. Most importantly I believe that this attitude can help us stay grounded and stops us from getting swept away in the magic of digital technology. In addition I believe that this principle can be extend to encompass not only our digital skills but also our personal research skills.

I did it my way

In the document on Stories Matter the writer discuss InterClipper and their experiences of using it. InterClipper was initially a software developed for market research and was enthusiastically adopted by Michael Frisch in 1998. The appealing thing about the software was “the seamless linkage between the digital audio/video files and a fairly robust multifield database for annotating and marking audio/video passages.” (Lambert and Frisch, p.137)  However, according to the Stories Matter team, the students who tested out InterClipper found a handful of problems with the software. They did not like that the oral history recordings had already been clipped. The students found that they clipped recordings were difficult to navigate and they lost the wider context of the life history. Furthermore, they disliked the indexing which they found “too scientific.” (Jessee, Zembrzycki, High, p. 3). 

To clip or not to clip? To transcribe or to index? Text verses audio verses video. I have heard all sides of the all of these arguments. When it comes to digital skills the DIY attitude is about whether the individual can use Microsoft Word or Adobe Audition, however with usage it is about how people research and their preferences when it comes to consuming knowledge, which can be a very personal affair. To start with people might have a physical or learning disability which restricts how they can research. People also have different learning styles. (Marcy) I, for example am a visual and audio learner, which means that I struggle with reading, and if there is the option consume the information through a documentary or podcast I will take it. People also have different motivations to access an oral history. An oral history is a multilayered artefact, a cornucopia of stories, which holds information that can be useful to a wide range of people from different fields of work and research. However, many of these softwares are created at universities: Stories Matter at Concordia University, Project Jukebox at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and OHMS at the University of Kentucky. These softwares will undoubtedly be influence by the environments in which they were made. In the case of Stories Matter the software was explicitly made for oral historians by oral historians, which is a pretty exclusive attitude. This also reenforces digital inequalities as Van Dijk says that the biggest digital divide in terms of usage is between those who have a higher education and those who do not. (p. 8)

It is not particularly radical to conclude that everyone is a unique being that does things in their own way. However, it is very important to remember this when you are designing something, which is exactly what the oral historians involved in these technologies are doing. In his zine, Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World and What We Can Do to Fix It, the designer Mike Monteiro outlines a code of ethics for designers. One of the things included in his code is “a designer does not believe in edge cases”. (p. 37) There is a history in design to have a target audience for your product, this by default means that you also have a non target audience. According to Monteiro this basically means you are marginalising people: you are actively deciding that your product will not be used by other people. He gives the example of Facebook’s real names projects, which affected trans people and people of indigenous backgrounds whose names were not consider “real”. But he also gives examples beyond Silicone Valley of single parent households “who get caught on the edges of ‘both parents must sign’ permission slips”, or voting ballots in America only being in English, excluding those of immigrants who have a right to vote but struggle with English. (p. 38) Within the setting of the oral history technologies I have talked about, the statement “a designer does not believe in edge cases” means that thought needs to be put into the differences between people’s digital skills and their research preferences. This applies both to the creator and the user of the oral history technology. Selecting who you are designing for in statements like “for oral historians by oral historians” is not caring for the edge cases, which in a field like oral history where one of the founding principles was giving a voice to the voiceless is shameful.

Forward to the Past

Imagine if they remade Back to the Future but kept it in the same time settings as before. Marty McFly would then be able to travel to the real 2015 and be thoroughly disappointed that everything kind of look the same accept no one would look him in the eye because they were all looking down at their phones. Imagine the audience’s disappointment when they presented, not with the magical flying car technology of the original movie, but the painful reality of a 2015 where we did not have the technology for hoverboards. Below you can see the interfaces of Project Jukebox in 1990 on the left (Smith, p. 17) and a screenshot of their website in 2021 on the right.

Back to the Future Part Two’s 2015 is the embodiment of the hopeful dream that is so heavily associated with technology. The same magic that can be felt in the papers on the original Project Jukebox which created the interface on the left. The real 2015 was more like the current interface, similar to what came before only now you can view it on a different device. Many people would take one look at the Project Jukebox’s interfaces and roll their eyes. They might ask, why has so little changed in the last 30 years? Hopefully, I have been able to slightly answer that question. Over the last 30 years oral historians have been wrestling with digital technology, searching for the best solution, only to end up penniless, tired and confused with only a few dead links to prove that something might have existed at some time. This might be a slight exaggeration. We have come far in the journey of oral history technology. However, I do wonder if we would not benefit more from looking back on our past, evaluating our failures, acknowledging the maintenance required, and using our old methods and DIY technologies as inspiration for our next creation. Maybe this will be a better way to continue instead of chasing the Back to the Future – esque dream of the perfect oral history technology.

Bibliography

Boyd, D. (2013) “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free” in The Oral History Review. 40(1) pp. 95-106

Boyd, D. (2014) “’I Just Want to Click on It to Listen’: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability” in Oral History and Digital Humanities ed. D. Boyd and M. Larson. pp. 77-96. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.

Jessee, E., Zembrzycki, S. and High, S. (2011) “Stories Matter: Conceptual challenges in the development of oral history database building software” In Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 12(1)

Lake, G. L. (1991) “Project Jukebox: An Innovative Way to Access and Preserve Oral History Records” in Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists. 9(1) pp. 24 – 41

Lambert, D. and Frisch, M. (2013) “Digital Curation through Information Cartography: A Commentary on Oral History in the Digital Age from a Content Management Point of View “ in  The Oral History Review. 40(1) pp. 135-153

Marcy, V. (2001) “Adult learning styles: How the VARK learning style inventory can be used to improve student learning” in Perspectives on Physician Assistant Education. 12(2) pp.117-120

Monteiro, M. (2019) Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. [EBOOK] Mule Design: San Francisco

Schneider, W. (2014) “Oral history in the age of digital possibilities” in Oral History and Digital Humanities ed. D. Boyd and M. Larson. pp. 19 – 33. Palgrave Macmillan: New York

Smith, S. (Oct 1991) “Project Jukebox: ‘We Are Digitizing Our Oral History Collection… and We’re Including a Database.’” at The Church Conference: Finding Our Way in the Communication Age. pp. 16 – 24. Anchorage, AK

Van Dijk, J.A. (2017) “Digital divide: Impact of access” in The international encyclopedia of media effects ed. P. Rössler. pp.1-11. John Wiley & Sons:

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_0070 Reading Group – 16/03/21

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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.