FranaWiki talk:Community Portal

==Oral History and Community Memory: Class Discussion Topics/Reading Schedule==

• What is Oral History and Who Does It?

Oral history is a very interdisciplinary craft. It is employed by historians, archivists, librarians, folklorists, anthopologists, educators, journalists, linguists, and genealogists.

• The History of Oral History

All history begins with oral accounts dredged up from memories. The first historians in the world were oral historians: Thucydides and Herodotus.

The Regional Oral History Office at UC, Berkeley began with the work of publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft, who was interested in the nineteenth-century settlement of California.

Earliest transcript in archives of the Columbia Oral History Research Office contains a first-hand account of the 1863 draft riots in New York City.

• Oral History Projects and Collections
• What is Ethnography?
• Ethnography Projects and Collections
• Arkansas Traveler’s Project (contact: Alli Hogue)
• Ethics & Sponsored Projects Office
• Release Forms/Ownership
• Photography
• Videography
• Video Editing Software
• Care of Ethnography Lab & Equipment
• Paying for OH: Grants and Proposals for Clinton project/Arkansas Heritage Council/SURF
• Knowledge Database: FranaWiki
• Creating/Editing Wikis/Standards that Apply
• Transcription/Processing Transcripts/Footnoting
• Archiving & Accessibility

The Internet has thrown open to millions the door to interview transcripts and audio archives.

• Sources/Background Research
• Interviewer’s Field Notes
• Life History Forms
• Professionalism/Public Relations/Correspondence

Oral history is a natural habitation for extroverts and conversationalists.

• Practice Interviewing on Each Other
• Personal Project
• Clinton Library & Downtown Little Rock Project
• Practice Interviewing on Doctor/Final Exam
• Oral History Documentaries/Musicals/Websites/Radio/Interpretive Skits
• UCA Folklore Collection (contact: Jimmy Bryant)
• Oral History in Scholarly Work
• Visiting the Library & Heifer HQ/Doe’s Eat Place
• Interviewing Style/Silence/Location/Active Listening

The best advice I can share is that oral history involves experiential learning, that is, learning by doing.

• Compiling Interview Topics & Questions

Oral history involves structured interviewing techniques.

• Gathering Artifacts/Manuscript Material from Interviewee

As a rule of thumb decline all attempts on the part of interviewees to give you material in their personal possession that they might later want back. Be sure that the interviewee has access to any copies of texts or artifacts they may give you.

• Criticisms of Oral History
  • Memory

Different eyewitnesses to history will give different accounts, as is true of witnesses to crimes or accidents.

• • Intersubjectivity
  • Presentism/Creating Usable Pasts
  • Mythmaking

• Interviewing Elites/Ordinary People
• Improving your methods/Reflecting on Interviews Conducted/Retrospective essay
• Types of Interviewing Products: Transcripts, Audio, Video
• Impact of Oral History on the Community
• Curriculum Development
• Assignment Read and Critique a Past Oral History: Clinton Project, Rick Scott, Women’s Abuse, HCOL history
• Clinton Library Visit by Skip Rutherford or Jose Guzzardi or Amanda Harris?
• Downtown Revitalization
• New Urbanism, Gentrification (contact: Patrick Taylor)