Oral History Association – Highlights

I attended the Oral History Association’s annual meeting last week and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I will be presenting my thoughts over the next couple of blogs.

Day 1 – “Introduction to Oral History Interviewing”

Workshop presented by Lois Myers (Baylor University), Rebecca Wright (NASA Johnson Space Center History Office), and Sandra Johnson (NASA Johnson Space Center History Office). 

The workshop was very good, very professionally presented, with excellent information and handouts.  Among the highlights:

• It is very important to have the interviewee sign a Release Form.  They provided several examples.
• Work from an outline rather than reading from a list of questions.  However, it is OK to write out the first question to get started.
• Avoid saying “uh-huh”, “yeah”, and so on, because you may accidentally speak at the same time as the interviewee.  When the recording is played back, it may be hard to understand the interviewee.    
• Sandra Johnson presented several options for recorders, but didn’t make a specific recommendation.  She said it depended upon too many variables.  But she did recommend the following guides created by the Vermont Folklife Center:
  • Audio Field Recording Guide 
  • Field Recording in the Digital Age
• Sandra said that she prefers lavaliere microphones, the small, individual mikes clipped on to a person’s clothing.  She uses two – one for the interviewer and one for the interviewee. 
• I asked specifically about using voice recognition software, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to help in transcribing the tapes.  Sandra and Rebecca said that they don’t use it.  They feel that the technology is not accurate enough yet because you have to “train” the software to understand the voices.  Since the majority of a recording is in the voice of the interviewee, it would be difficult for the software to interpret the majority of the tape.
• It is best to record and save the original files (to be archived) as WAV files rather than MP3 files.
• Write only on the small plastic inner circle of a CD.  Do not put a label on the CD.  Archival CDs include MAM-A 74 Archive Gold CDs.
• It is important to transcribe the recording because researchers will work from a transcription; they may not take the time to listen to a recording.       

• Although Lois Myers hesitated to recommend just one book, she said that if you are only getting one oral history book, a good one would be Recording Oral History by Valerie Raleigh Yow.