The
recent passing of Studs Terkel sparked a renewed interest in his interview projects, like
Working,
Race, and
Hard Times. But Studs was not just a broadcaster who liked people; he was a practitioner of
oral history, a method of gathering information about the past through preserving individual recollections. It's a
subfield of history, with its own
ethics,
techniques,
professional literature,
uses, and
limitations.
Learn how to
collect and share oral histories yourself, from
interviewing to
recording and getting
clearances to
preserving and disseminating. Oral histories have been preserved as
text transcripts for decades; now digital media is
reinvigorating the form, bringing new ease to recording and
wider opportunities for the public to
see and hear the content. Explore oral history projects on the web with stories of
veterans,
suffragists,
Tibetans,
jazz cats,
Nevada nuclear test site witnesses,
Basque Americans,
rodeo cowboys and cowgirls,
musicians,
Katrina survivors,
ACT UP activists,
Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge,
Native Americans,
women whose lives were affected by the Pill,
survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire,
women in World War II,
Hawai'ians,
workers in Paterson, NJ....
posted by Miko
on Dec 11, 2008 -
20 comments
Voice Thread Now the online world can lend support in your family argument about what
really happened on your fifth birthday.
posted by Miko
on Nov 5, 2007 -
6 comments
Debating the Moral Obligations of Memory. Jean Améry inspired Avishai Margalit and the late W.G. Sebald to likewise wrestle with questions of torture, revenge, and memory; questions as the destruction of memory, the obsession with memory, nationalism and memory, false memory, bad memory, opportunistic memory, lost memory, “too much” memory, memory versus reconciliation and, yes, the ethics of memory. In the Boston Review, Susie Linfield observes that for Améry, "the dream time of vengeance is the best place to be." (via the Cultural News Digest, nextbook.org)
posted by semmi
on Aug 15, 2003 -
11 comments
