What did your oral history project look like?
December 30, 2022 11:16 AM   Subscribe

I'm going to interview my dad to create an oral history, and I'm curious about how others have done this. We have a good idea about the topics we want to cover (we'll tackle them as small segments) but I still haven't decided on the best output.

My dad has a wealth of photographs saved on his computer that he'd like to incorporate. Some were taken by him, but many are digitized slides that were taken by his parents and grandmother.

I originally thought of simply doing a voice recording (and transcribing using something like Otter.ai) but now I'm not sure how to incorporate the photographs. I have video editing experience but I'm not sure if videotaping him is a great idea (especially since he'll need to be at the computer to refer to any photographs.)

I'm aware of Story Corps and some other oral history resources but I'd love to see some examples of projects that were done really well. If you've undertaken this sort of project, I'd love to hear what your final output looked like. What tools did you use? How did you share it with others?

This is something we'd like to record for posterity and share with family members.
posted by Pademelon to Media & Arts (2 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have conducted oral histories for academic purposes, so my final output was a dissertation and academic articles (and hopefully, eventually a book). So a little different than your project. But I think I can offer a few tips:

1. It can't hurt to record in multiple formats - audio + film - that way however you decide to organize it, you've got the material.

2. Don't try to get it all in one take/interview. Often in the process of the first interview, and then sitting with that information, new questions will present themselves.

3. Do a little historical research - don't expect him to remember every relevant event or cultural moment - whatever time period he's talking about, do a little research on.

4. Keep your questions as open-needed as possible.

5. Take notes as you interview, even if it's all being recorded - in can help afterward to just have a list of the order in which different topics came up.

6. If your dad ever gets stuck, sometimes people will get more vocal/specific about the past when instructed to describe was was different about it.
posted by coffeecat at 11:51 AM on December 31, 2022


I’ve done many interviews for film and as oral histories. I usually print out all the photos that we plan to discuss in the interview. Then I shoot over the shoulder of the interviewee, as he or she thumbs thought the stack of photos or the scrapbook. That way, I’ll have something to cut to when we want to talk about a specific event or images. Also that makes it easier to dissolve from the person holding the photo to going to full-screen of the image.
Decide before you start recording if the interview/oral history is going to follow a chronological pattern or one of different family branches or how the family moved around
posted by Ideefixe at 2:22 PM on January 1, 2023


« Older Exploring cataract surgery: any experience with...   |   Did cutting drinking help your anxiety and... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.