By Dr. Elizabeth M. Melton, ACLS Leading Edge Fellow This day has been long in the making! About a year ago, I started working with IDCL to create a new online training program for anyone who wants to learn how to create an oral history project that promotes social justice. Eleonora Anedda (IDCL Oral Historian), … Continue reading Top 5 Perks of Enrolling in IDCL’s Oral History for Social Change Certificate
This year marked the 20th anniversary of September 11. To document this day, IDCL and I-AMM hosted an event to commemorate the tragic losses and reflect on the long-term consequences that have shaped the lives of Texans over the past twenty years. Our panelists Dr. Habiba Noor, Dr. Banafsheh Madaninejad, Ramish Nadeem, and Dr. Roy … Continue reading Reflecting on 9/11 Twenty Years Later
Charm and coquetry, Hossein Behzad Curating digital oral history archives is a widely discussed digital-age topic in our field. What follows is a discussion around Religions Texas’ archiving and processing method. Metadata When we meet with the narrator for the interview, before we begin, we usually ask them to share with us a few biographical details … Continue reading Digital Archiving at Religions Texas
Cat (Sketches from Life), Shen Zhou The day before the interview, I grab a journal and simply jot down a few questions that I definitely want to ask and leave some space in between each to write down follow up topics when I conduct the actual interview. There are times when people jump from topic to … Continue reading Interviewing: Our Experience
The Apple Paring, Clementine Hunter This is a step-by-step piece on oral history interviewing. We will discuss designing an oral history collection, background research, and getting in touch with narrators. Lastly, we’re going to address pre-interviewing and interviewing best practices. Step One: Project Design and Background Research As we’ve mentioned in the first episode of … Continue reading “Do you have another question?” Oral History Interviewing: Ethics and Best Practices | Episode Three
Inspired by the Institute of Diversity and Civic Life (IDCL)’s work, Eleonora Anedda explores IDCL’s approach to its oral history transcripts, and how their method presents a way to navigate the challenges of preserving the relationship between the narrator and the transcript.
Oral history and tradition have been around since humanity started to tell stories. The Iliad and Odyssey were passed down orally for many centuries before Homer (or someone else, depending on which side of the “Homer question” you’re on) actually wrote them down. However, scholars only began to see oral history’s validity and potential in the 1930s. In this piece, I will highlight some of the key moments in the life of Oral History as an academic field — with particular focus on the Western and American academy. - Eleonora Anedda
This is the first piece of a series on the many dimensions of oral history. Here we briefly introduce oral history as a methodology and we address critics’ concern over the reliability of oral history sources. In the next episodes of this series, we are going to talk about the history of this field and how it came to be what it is today; interviewing, ethics and best practices; transcribing; archiving and curating oral histories in digital archives; and lastly, IDCL’s lived religion approach and method for the Religions Texas Oral History Project. - Eleonora Anedda
How African American history in Austin remains relatively unrecognized—by Chase Bartlett
Part II of a series investigating projects that document religious and cultural diversity across the country. By Lauren Horn Griffin As we prepare to launch our own research project mapping and documenting the cultural diversity of Texas, we want to give our readers an idea of the types of initiatives from across the country that … Continue reading Civil Rights in Black and Brown Oral History Project
