ii.
Authoring Oral History Online
Accordingly one of the skills of electronic scholarship (as with most scholarship) is learning to contain your research ambitions. In electronic scholarship this can only be achieved through technological literacy. A
greater technical literacy within the Humanities can help to address the chasm between what is said about the Internet and what it can actually do. Arguably the plague of ‘the virtual’ that has spread in the Humanities in recent years would retreat if scholars in this field developed just
a basic understanding of what the Internet can actually do. It is all about balance.
In my mind the Internet is the least advanced of all mediums in terms of evoking stories (in comparison to say television and film) and this is something I have struggled with constantly in this project. How do you
tell stories in this medium and if you cannot tell stories, then of what use is it to a narrative discipline such as history?
As I have discovered, oral histories are well suited for the Internet because restrictive copyright legislation restricts the scholarly use of the enormous potential of our archived aural and visual record. There is no copyrighted material used in
Milkbar.com.au simply because as an independent course of study it was not pragmatic. Arguably, this is perhaps why many other independent electronic-scholarship researchers have used archives that are either copyright free or held in family collections.
An oral history (especially one that uses digital video) is not only legalistically and economically suited for independent research, but also addresses some of the capacities of new media tools. As Peter Loizos, the
ethnographic filmmaker argues:
…monographs do not normally create the illusion of direct access to an observed and recorded world, films tend to have this impact upon viewers until they have trained themselves out of seeing them as records of the real...
Online video histories can evocatively represent the past well because the individual can be seen and heard. Oral histories are fundamentally verbal, meaning that in many cases (especially evocative histories such as
Milkbar.com.au) it may be better to use new media communication tools rather than textually translate them within a book.
Oral history methodologies usually require the researcher to first provide a theoretical perspective or historical problem and then undertake the oral interviews. They then look for converging trends and contradictions among the
evidence and then provide the analysis in the form of a book or monologue. In this work, the methodology is a little different as part of the authority of the Historian is given to the user.
As discussed in Chapter One the hypertext-Historian does relinquish some of the control over the material (or at least the power relations of authorship are changed). The authorship in this work is embedded in the technology;
it is embedded within the selection, interpretation, integration, and then the assembled contexts, juxtapositions and representation of the real.
Together this forms an argument. However, this argument is within a broader set of parameters than those allowed by the sequential reading of the printed codex. In some ways, the reader becomes in part author, or at least they
can make their own way through the ‘archive’ and perhaps (within reason) gain differing insights from the material than I originally intended.
In most oral histories projects, the interviews are locked away in archives and libraries and are very rarely used outside of the original raison d’etre of the Historian. It is advantageous to place oral histories online
because the user not only has direct access to the Historian’s evidence but, as the Historian Linda Shopes argues, the user is able to get a much better understanding of the character and the context in which the interview was recorded (for better or worse).
One thinks of irony, for example, as something that is communicated by tone, not words, and so can be lost if not rendered orally. Similarly, hearing, rather than reading, narrator's accounts can render them more compelling, more
humane or chilling, more three-dimensional. Quite simply then, by reproducing actual recorded sound, web publication of interviews is perhaps more appropriate than print publication.
Oral histories are people’s histories in that they are usually the everyday recollections that are left out of recorded institutional memories. They are records of everyday life and are important traces to help us
understand past people and practices. Perhaps this is also a good reason for Internet publication; local digital histories can record the city around the archive, not just the city within the archive. The level of access to the Internet lends itself towards community histories because
specialist histories are already well serviced by our ‘official’ archives (and even the broader Humanities Computing field).
In some ways, hypertextual authorship can help us reveal some of the chaos of history without resorting to theoretical ineptitude. However, writing about hypertext and the processes of electronic authorship in the
Humanities is a difficult task because it is like writing about writing. Nevertheless, it is extraordinarily important for us to critically understand the significant contributions of Humanities Computing scholars beyond the technical perspective. We also need to understand the
institutional and cultural typologies of electronic scholarship and thus the realities of independent authorship.
The
challenges of electronic scholarship for an independent and
interdisciplinary post-graduate student are enormous and are
discussed in the final chapter of this exegetical-thesis, where
I reflect upon some of the core understandings gained during
the course of this study. more>>
