Donald A. Ritchie - Doing Oral History

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ritchie, Donald A.
Doing oral history / Donald A. Ritchie. Third edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9780199329335 (paperback : alkaline paper) ISBN 9780199395194 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Oral history. 2. Oral historyMethodology. 3. Historiography. I. Title.
D16.14.R57 2014
907.2dc23
2014028835

To Anne Ritchie

Most human affairs happen without leaving vestiges or records of any kind behind them. The past, having happened, has perished with only occasional traces. To begin with, although the absolute number of historical writings is staggering, only a small part of what happened in the past was ever observed....And only a part of what was observed in the past was remembered by those who observed it; only a part of what was remembered was recorded; only a part of what was recorded has survived; only a part of what has survived has come to historians attention; only a part of what has come to their attention is credible; only a part of what is credible has been grasped; and only a part of what has been grasped can be expounded or narrated by the historian.

Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History (1950)

Think forward or get left behind has become a catchphrase for grappling with fast-moving changes in digital technology. For oral historians, more compact and affordable digital audio and video recorders produce better quality recordings and offer new streams of possibilities for using their interviews and returning them to the communities where they were conducted. But technological advances have made older equipment obsolete, jeopardizing investments and complicating the long-term preservation of interview collections. Technology can even veer in a different direction between the beginning and end of a project, no matter how careful the advance planning. In such a technologically driven field as oral history, practitioners who are caught unprepared will fall behind.

All of these changes also complicate the task of writing an oral history manual. The first edition of Doing Oral History appeared in 1995, designed to fill the need for an up-to-date, user-friendly guide to collecting, preserving, and disseminating oral history. I had considered editing a volume with multiple contributors, but that opened the possibility of receiving conflicting advice. Since oral history is a dialogue, I sought to create a conversation with the reader. Having conducted many oral history workshops, I drew from the issues and problems people had raised, which this book replicates in a question-and-answer format that moves from the general to the specific.

By the time the second edition appeared in 2003, the digital revolution had arrived. In the 1990s, oral historians still talked about the tape and transcript. Tape began to disappear so quickly that references to taping had to be changed to recording. A new generation of interviewers had never used a reel-to-reel or cassette recorders and puzzled over terms such as fast forward. Technological changes made even recent equipment seem quaint. The minidisk recorder, initially touted by the experts, was speedily surpassed. The use of oral history for exhibits and heritage touring leaped from cassettes and compact disks to QR codes and smartphone apps. Project directors needed to think clearly about the long-term use of the equipment in which they were investing. Oral historians were just too small a segment of the consuming public to shape the market or to set standards for archival-quality recordings. Instead, it proved advisable to follow the music, on the reasonable assumption that whatever technology became most favored for music distribution would prevail on the market the longest.

As oral historians grew more comfortable with new equipment, they expanded into video recording of oral histories and discovered the endless possibilities of posting interviews, transcripts, and recordings on the Internet, for worldwide distribution. Having found a way to get oral history off the archival shelves and into the community, oral historians also had to consider the ethical and legal issues of exposing interviewees to greater public scrutiny. Practitioners began raising new concerns and sharing responses not only at conferences and workshops but also through the oral history listserv, H-OralHist, a part of the Humanities & Social Sciences Online initiative H-Net. I have been following those messages closely to determine what new questions were being asked, and how best to answer them.

The Internet has left us no excuses for parochialism. As the practice of oral history grew more international, manuals could neither address themselves to a single nation nor ignore the rest of the world. Every second year the International Oral History Association meets in a different location around the globe, drawing hundreds of practitioners from every continent. Wherever social, political, or economic turmoil has occurred, oral histories have recorded the changebecause state archives tend to reflect the old regimes. The collapse of the Soviet Union spurred oral history projects across Russia and eastern Europe. The economic transformation of China, India, and other nations had a similar impact in Asia. The end of apartheid in South Africa unleashed new interview projects because oral historians realized that their George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons were still living. Challenges to undemocratic regimes in Latin America and the Middle East spurred efforts to record and preserve protestors memories and experiences. Internationally, oral history also gave greater voice to those who had been marginalized in historical narratives, ranging from Native, Aboriginal, and First Nation voices, to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community.

War, terrorism, hurricanes, floods, fires, pandemics, and other natural and human-made disasters spurred oral historians to interview those who endured trauma and tragedy, and required interviewers to adjust their approaches. Issues of empathy for those suffering emotional distress increasingly became part of the discourse among oral historians. At the same time, the use of interviewing grew more interdisciplinary, with historians examining the fieldwork techniques and needs of social scientists, and social scientists evaluating the benefits of qualitative research. New theoretical interests developed, particularly surrounding memory studies. Oral historians became more concerned about not only what people remembered but also what they forgot, and how they expressed these memories.