FranaWiki talk:Community Portal - Revision history

Phil: /* What is Oral History and Who Does It? */

2011-01-20T15:11:18Z

‎What is Oral History and Who Does It?

Phil: /* What is Oral History and Who Does It? */

2011-01-18T15:13:56Z

‎What is Oral History and Who Does It?

Phil: /* Ethics */

2011-01-12T12:37:19Z

‎Ethics

Phil: /* This Page is Too Large */

2009-03-16T17:31:19Z

‎This Page is Too Large

Phil: /* Ethics */

2009-03-16T17:22:10Z

‎Ethics

Zinoviev: clarification

2008-10-19T00:21:45Z

clarification

Zinoviev: Huge need merely be capitalized. All caps is somewhat rude, I'll concede.

2008-10-19T00:21:22Z

Huge need merely be capitalized. All caps is somewhat rude, I'll concede.

Zinoviev: Everyone's soul. Not just mine.

2008-10-19T00:20:49Z

Everyone's soul. Not just mine.

Zinoviev: New section: This page is HUGE

2008-10-19T00:20:10Z

New section: This page is HUGE

Phil at 04:13, 5 March 2008

2008-03-05T04:13:51Z

@@ Line 9: / Line 9: @@
 As a teenager I had become interested in the memories shared by older members of my community while working for the now-shuttered Cunningham Drug Store in Grinnell, Iowa. Cunningham Drug advertising home delivery of prescriptions and, it being an earlier time, local high school students like myself were hired to drive a truck laden with controlled substances all over town. The most important part of my job, I came to discover, was not delivering the goods. Rather, what customers really wanted was my time. Most of them were house-bound or residents of local retirement homes. Many had not talked to anyone for days. Sometimes their last contact was me, on a prior delivery. When I first started working the job, I'd tried to get through my route in record time, hoping to impress the boss. But then pretty early on, Big Jim Cunningham stopped me on my way down to the delivery drivers' haunt, the basement of the store, and said something curious to me. He said, "Take your time on those deliveries. And I'm not telling you because I think you'll wreck the truck." That's all he said. And, in fact, I must have screwed up my face at his remark, because the store's delivery trucks had been totaled a couple of times before I got my hands on one. But I took it slower from then on out, and I had a lot more fun, lingering over conversations with elderly customers and picking up the occasional homemade cookie. Pretty soon I realized that Jim Cunningham was a genius. Customers flocked to Cunningham Drug, in part, because these nice young boys, we were all boys in those days, delivered their prescriptions.
-Our favorite customer, most of us agreed on this, was ninety-year-old Sara Ann Brown. Sara Ann lived quietly, well not so quietly for a ninety-year-old, at the Mayflower Retirement Home. She was a member of the Grinnell High School class of 1923 (I was in the class of 1987), and her memory was striking. What really blew me away was that Sara Ann had received Iowa State University's first home economics doctorate in 1942. I remember thinking how amazing it was that she was smart and old. And not just smart, because I'd been smacked around by lots of smart old women, but she had a Ph.D. She was "Dr." Brown. Wow!
+Our favorite customer, most of us agreed on this, was ninety-year-old Sara Ann Brown. Sara Ann lived quietly, well not so quietly for a ninety-year-old, at the Mayflower Retirement Home in Grinnell. She was a member of the Grinnell High School class of 1923 (I was in the class of 1987), and her memory was striking. What really blew me away was that Sara Ann had received Iowa State University's first home economics doctorate in 1942. I remember thinking how amazing it was that she was smart and old. And not just smart, because I'd been smacked around by lots of smart old women, but she had a Ph.D. She was "Dr." Brown. Wow! I mentioned Sara Ann's name at the dinner table one night, and some of the stories Sara Ann had shared with me as I stood in her doorway with the half-forgotten white prescription sack in my hand. I told them about how she smoked cigars openly in Copenhagen, Denmark, at a time when that wasn't considered "lady-like" in the U.S. I recounted how Sara Ann took the Dinky railroad to school at Iowa State, baked cherry pies for the campus' spring Veisha celebration, and principaled in the most "god forsaken" parts of Iowa.
 Questions to consider: What are the characteristics of a good oral historian? Is oral history a performance art? What's the difference between oral history and journalism? Is oral history just for us? Who stands to benefit? Why is it valuable?

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 ==What is Oral History and Who Does It?==
-Originally, oral history was simply defined as a conversational narrative that got archived. David Kyvig has said that “oral history is nothing more than the application of common sense to the pursuit of information.” Thus, we’re going to be sharing lots of rules of thumb, heuristics, in this class.
+Originally, oral history was simply defined as a conversational narrative that got archived. David Kyvig has said that "oral history is nothing more than the application of common sense to the pursuit of information." Thus, we're going to be sharing lots of heuristics, or "rules of thumb," in this class. Oral history, traditionally, is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. Contemporary oral history involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events.
-The information passed on has occasionally shown a surprising accuracy over long periods of time. For example, the Iliad, an epic poem of Homer describing the conquest of Troy, was passed down as oral history from perhaps the 8th century BC, until being recorded in writing by Pisistratos. Nonetheless, factual elements of the Iliad were at least partially validated by the discovery of ruins discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1870, thought to be those of the city described in the poem.
+The information passed on has occasionally shown a surprising accuracy over long periods of time. For example, the Iliad, an epic poem of Homer describing the conquest of Troy, was passed down as oral history from perhaps the 8th century BC, until being recorded in writing by Pisistratus some two hundred years later. Nonetheless, factual elements of the Iliad were at least partially validated by the discovery of ruins discovered by German businessman and archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann in 1870, thought to be those of the city described in the poem.
 A famous example of oral history comes from the works of several authors who have, over the span of many hundreds of years, collected folklore which was ultimately put together in a book known as the Old Testament. The New Testament was created by several different original authors whose slightly differing versions of many biblical events were combined. The Bible was therefore nearly entirely created using oral history.
-Questions to consider: What are the characteristics of a good oral historian? Is oral history a performance art? What’s the difference between oral history and journalism? Is oral history just for us? Who stands to benefit? Why is it valuable?
+As a teenager I had become interested in the memories shared by older members of my community while working for the now-shuttered Cunningham Drug Store in Grinnell, Iowa. Cunningham Drug advertising home delivery of prescriptions and, it being an earlier time, local high school students like myself were hired to drive a truck laden with controlled substances all over town. The most important part of my job, I came to discover, was not delivering the goods. Rather, what customers really wanted was my time. Most of them were house-bound or residents of local retirement homes. Many had not talked to anyone for days. Sometimes their last contact was me, on a prior delivery. When I first started working the job, I'd tried to get through my route in record time, hoping to impress the boss. But then pretty early on, Big Jim Cunningham stopped me on my way down to the delivery drivers' haunt, the basement of the store, and said something curious to me. He said, "Take your time on those deliveries. And I'm not telling you because I think you'll wreck the truck." That's all he said. And, in fact, I must have screwed up my face at his remark, because the store's delivery trucks had been totaled a couple of times before I got my hands on one. But I took it slower from then on out, and I had a lot more fun, lingering over conversations with elderly customers and picking up the occasional homemade cookie. Pretty soon I realized that Jim Cunningham was a genius. Customers flocked to Cunningham Drug, in part, because these nice young boys, we were all boys in those days, delivered their prescriptions.
-Oral histories serve several purposes. In the early days they were about filling gaps in the historical record. Oral historians were creating knowledge that would otherwise not exist. But oral history is so much more than this. Plugging a gap in culture with ideas that are not part of that culture falsifies its shape, because culture really has no gaps. Historians are every day engaged in falsifying culture! It’s called selection bias. At any given time the historical repertoire of culture is narrowly limited, with a limited set of alternative interpretations. Historians “fix” this problem all the time.
+Our favorite customer, most of us agreed on this, was ninety-year-old Sara Ann Brown. Sara Ann lived quietly, well not so quietly for a ninety-year-old, at the Mayflower Retirement Home. She was a member of the Grinnell High School class of 1923 (I was in the class of 1987), and her memory was striking. What really blew me away was that Sara Ann had received Iowa State University's first home economics doctorate in 1942. I remember thinking how amazing it was that she was smart and old. And not just smart, because I'd been smacked around by lots of smart old women, but she had a Ph.D. She was "Dr." Brown. Wow!
 The general objective of any archive recording program should be to use oral history methods as a means both documenting and of preserving the past. The process product of such work ought to open up new fields of research. It should also seek to meet the broader educational interests of present and future generation by showing them the conditions of life and the variety of experiences of their parents and grand-parents and reflecting and illustrating characteristics or change which make a particular society or culture distinctive.
@@ Line 25: / Line 30: @@
 All history begins with oral accounts dredged up from memories. The first historians in the world were oral historians: Thucydides and Herodotus. History is story plus interpretation, and oral history is no different. Oral history is handmaiden to both social history and archival practice.
 The Regional Oral History Office at UC, Berkeley began in the 1860s with the work of publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was interested in the nineteenth-century settlement of California. It was professionalized under Willa Baum beginning in 1958. The Federal Writer’s Project of the WPA began collecting oral narratives in the 1930s. Folklorist B.A. Botkin collected oral histories as part of his Former Slave Narratives project.

@@ Line 94: / Line 94: @@
 There’s a great story by John Wyndham about historians from the future who go back in time and study the past. They are not supposed to make any changes in the past because once they interfere they may cause irreparable damage by changing the course of history. You as an oral historian engaging in interviewing will always be transforming the person who is being interviewed. Assume that every time you conduct an interview you will be changing the timeline.
-[http://alpha.dickinson.edu/oha/pub_eg.html Evaluation Guidelines of the Oral History Association.]
+[http://alpha.dickinson.edu/oha/pub_eg.html Evaluation Guidelines of the Oral History Association]
 Oral histories can serve as evidence of crimes. It is possible to libel or defame someone in the process of taking an oral history. Historians do not enjoy client privilege. You cannot defame the dead.

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:31, 16 March 2009
Line 540:		Line 540:
	* Clinton Library & Downtown Little Rock Project		* Clinton Library & Downtown Little Rock Project
	* Practice Interviewing on Doctor/Final Exam		* Practice Interviewing on Doctor/Final Exam
−
−	~~== This Page is Too Large ==~~
−
−	~~It oppresses the soul in its grandiosity and impossible breadth.~~

@@ Line 91: / Line 91: @@
 ===Ethics===
-There is a special code of ethics in this business because you ca create more damage in the name of science than you are really producing for the historical craft. You need to be extra careful because what may slip out in an informal setting is part of a person’s secret life. Most people have a secret life that they don’t reveal, especially to those they are close to. But who are you? The interviewee may feel more comfortable sharing a piece of their secret life with you than with their own family members. There’s a line of propriety here that you are going to have to find.
+There is a special code of ethics in this business because you can create more damage in the name of science than you are really producing for the historical craft. You need to be extra careful because what may slip out in an informal setting is part of a person’s secret life. Most people have a secret life that they don’t reveal, especially to those they are close to. But who are you? The interviewee may feel more comfortable sharing a piece of their secret life with you than with their own family members. There’s a line of propriety here that you are going to have to find.
 There’s a great story by John Wyndham about historians from the future who go back in time and study the past. They are not supposed to make any changes in the past because once they interfere they may cause irreparable damage by changing the course of history. You as an oral historian engaging in interviewing will always be transforming the person who is being interviewed. Assume that every time you conduct an interview you will be changing the timeline.

@@ Line 541: / Line 541: @@
 * Practice Interviewing on Doctor/Final Exam
-== This page is Huge ==
+== This Page is Too Large ==
 It oppresses the soul in its grandiosity and impossible breadth.

← Older revision		Revision as of 00:20, 19 October 2008
Line 543:		Line 543:
	== This page is HUGE ==		== This page is HUGE ==

−	It oppresses my soul in its grandiosity and impossible breadth.	+	It oppresses the soul in its grandiosity and impossible breadth.

@@ Line 147: / Line 147: @@
 '''Full name.''' Place and date of birth. Father’s name, place and date of birth, occupation. Mother’s name, place and date of birth, occupation. Grandparents: names, places and dates of birth. Any memories of them? When did family members come to America? What was their physical appearance? What stories have you heard about them? Were you told any stories about other forebears? If so, what were they?
-'''Childhood:''' Where did you grow up? Describe the house you lived in. Describe the sort of food you ate. Describe the types of clothes you wore. Describe the games you played as a child (not only sport but things like skipping, marbles, etc)
+'''Childhood:''' Where did you grow up? Describe the house you lived in. Describe the sort of food you ate. Describe the types of clothes you wore. Describe the games you played as a child (not only sport but things like skipping, marbles, etc). What chores did you have to complete?
 '''Family activities:''' What sort of things did your family celebrate? (Christmas, birthdays, etc). Describe a typical family Christmas/birthday and/or another appropriate family gathering. Describe