oral history

Conducting and oral interview takes skill. It isn't enough to simply walk into a room, sit down, and ask questions. Questionnaires must be created prior to the interview, the recording devices must be fully functional, there must be consent forms, and the relationship of the interviewer/interviewee must be kind/respectful among many other things. Conducting an oral interview isn't like going to an archive and reading sources; interviews are with living sources, human beings. Unless of course you're interviewing a dog, in which case, I commend you on your canine translation skills. So many delicate factors go into oral history, and it's important to know the rules, social conduct, and procedural factors.

The Veteran's Project seems fascinating. It is interesting that it's a collection of interviews with people of all ranks, civilian and veteran. Oral history research requires good interview technique, a clear research strategy, should try to obtain as much personal memories as possible, and to acknowledge that as an interviewer you are both an 'insider' and an 'outsider.' The reading from Public History by Diaz and Russell, Oral Historians: Community Oral History and the Cooperative Ideal, has to do with the processes of oral history. The part I found the most interesting was about oral history as a collective entity, dealing with administration, partnerships, and community. As Diaz and Russell say, the oral historian 'wears many hats.' The oral historian is a link between the public, other professionals, and the project itself. I think sometimes it's easy to forget how important oral history can be. It gives voice to those who may not have the ability to speak for themselves. It can often be 'history from below' or 'common history'. This is a lesson I need to learn from my house history project because it isn't a spectacular house. It's an ordinary one, and there is intrinsic value in it, just as there is value in a grand old house. Life happened in my house just as it happened in the big houses. So while a house history project isn't oral history, the two types of history share a goal; to tell the story of the minority, the common person.

The Goshen College CIIE research uses studies, oral interviews, academic data, and other types of sources and forms those sources into research projects involving latino people in higher education. It's interesting for Goshen particularly because there is such a large latino presence in the city and in the public schools. I really had no idea that Goshen College was doing this type of research, and I think it's pretty cool. It also makes me a little ashamed that I walk by the CIIE office every time I get my mail, and I have never known what happens in there. This connects to oral history because it requires project grants, research and interviews, and also happens to be a kind of 'minority' history.

Digital Archives

The 9/11 Digital Archive is a powerful tool of collecting memories, images, oral history, and recollections of a massive event in recent history. The site, described by James T. Sparrow, is simple and easy to use. The portal format lets users and contributors easily navigate the site. Besides the surface level organization, the search bars are helpful to find a broad subject of topics/words. I don't think that I have really ever looked at a digital archive before. The benefit of something like this is that it can collect so many people's memories at their own discretion. However, it takes a lot of planning and careful consideration from the authors of the website about how to collect these objects. Using an open source format helps to ensure that the sources will be attainable in many years, once the format and coding of our technology has advanced past recognition.

Public historians have to adapt to this new format of attaining and collecting information. Public digital archives place a lot of value on the individual's experience. The people who create these archives have a responsibility to the historical profession but also to the public who submits and reads the content of the archives. The work of the historian in the future will become more digitized and less physical documents. Interpreting online sources will become a prevalent part of primary sources involved in research. With advancing technology, historians will need to be trained to discern between fiction and fact, and without contextual information always, they will have to rely on their training and competence to figure out how to portray the information they read. It is certainly a changing profession.

On a different note, visiting the Elkhart County Historical Museum again and then talking with Matt Schuld gave me some insight to how exhibits are set up and how to design one. It will definitely be a challenging project to figure out what parts of the East Lincoln neighborhood we want to include in an exhibit and how to represent them.

photographs, artifacts, and internships

As someone who has spent many, many, hours in a darkroom herself, I loved Chapter Seven on photographs. Because I have a relatively complete understanding of what it means to create and preserve an image from film, I found it fascinating to read about how museums use photographs. I was lucky (and talented) enough to take four semesters of film photography in high school, working from the beginning with a standard 35mm SLR film camera, developing my own film, using negatives, enlarging the images, and developing the image onto photo paper. After the first introductory class, I began experimenting with more complex processes like medium and large format, box cameras, pinholes, brownie cameras, holga cameras, and post-processing editing in the darkroom as well as diving into digital photography and digital post-processing. I have an eye and an innate love for photographs and the processes that create them. A photograph will captivate my mind for much longer than other types of artifacts do. Interpreting an image takes a lot of work and a trained eye. I had never thought about the complications that come with digitally storing images. Hard drives and CD-ROMs are fairly unreliable.

Artifacts have lives. The journey from being created from the hands of a human, being used and handled, to eventual preservation and being labeled an 'artifact' signifies in itself the importance of preservation. Artifacts can be living examples of the experience that someone has had with that object. I thought it was great that the artifact chapter mentioned Conner Prairie because we will get to visit that in March.

Upon viewing Nina Simon's blog, I was struck by the guest blog by Michelle Millar Fisher on unpaid internships in the museum/history/arts field. Millar Fisher argues that unpaid internships are unethical within the field and that interns should be compensated somehow for their work. I agree. Reading the comments from the post, the student voices stood out. Student interns shared that in an unpaid internship for college credit, the student is paying sometimes up to four or five thousand dollars to work 25 hours/week for free. And that is just not financially responsible for many students, who may also be balancing a part-time job to help pay for tuition. I fit this mold. I am a full time student, work 20 hours/week part-time, and I am a student-athlete. I would be financially unable to give up 20 hours of paid work for 20 hours of unpaid work. I am an athlete, partially because I enjoy the sport, and partially because my athletic scholarship helps me pay to come to school. An unpaid internship is simply not an option for me.

Unpaid internships are a form of discrimination against minorities and poor students. Since we are often unable to pay for travel and living expenses, we are denied opportunities for amazing internships that would further our careers. It is unethical and unfair of the profession to hire unpaid labor. Just because these students are unable to afford to participate in an unpaid internship does not make them any less hard-working, committed, or intelligent.

Millar Fisher suggests these options for a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

Maybe someday, hopefully soon, these ideas or others can be implemented and more students can have access to great internships.

a combination of topics/museum curation

This week was a week full of public history. I tried on multiple occasions to work on my house history project. The guide is step by step, and I've done a lot up to Step 5. We drove to the Elkhart Offices, only to find that they closed at 4pm and not 5pm. We were three minutes late because of bad roads. This was on a Thursday afternoon and because we missed the first part of the step, we had to cancel our plans to go to Bristol on Saturday, which Liz had never confirmed anyway. It was frustrating because I had made the plans to complete the research, but because of time and weather restrictions I wasn't able to, and now I feel like I'm further behind in my project than I want to be. Trying to accommodate office hours of 9-4 when you're a full time student takes a lot of planning, and when that planning goes awry, it makes things so complicated.

On Friday evening, Anastasia, Natalie, and I went to look at the Goshen Historical Museum. It was freezing outside, and so there weren't very many people around. We went inside around 7:45 and stayed for 25 minutes, looking around and asking questions. The museum, to be honest, really wasn't that impressive, although I did enjoy looking at the photography equipment and the massive safe that hasn't been moved in over 100 years. I felt as though some of the novelty of the museum was over my head because I'm not a Goshen local. To those who grew up in Goshen, I bet that the museum would be more interesting. The Goshen Historical Museum definitely fit the local history museum typical model. I didn't see any arrowheads, but there was a stained glass native american head.

I'm excited to go back to the Elkhart County Historical Museum and look at the exhibits, especially because my final project is the exhibit project. I think that the reading from Public History on museum curators has opened my eyes to how much work goes into a museum. I read that in local museums, the curator often does the job of many, and I thought of Liz, who is the collections curator at ECHM.

documentaries... true history?

In Public History this week, we read about public history and the arts. There were three readings, one from Public History and two journal articles: "Theatre: A Neglected Site of Public History?" and "Histories and the Public: Legacies of the Progressive Era." I will focus mostly on the chapter on film medium and documentaries. 

As a history major, one of the things that frustrates me the most is when I am telling someone about a subject that I am working on, and they say, "Oh I watched a documentary on that last week!" As if that makes them an immediate expert on the whole subject. Now, I love documentaries, don't get me wrong. More than once over Christmas break I spent the day on the couch with Blue Planet, Ken Burns' National Parks, a variety of climbing documentaries, and a bowl of ice cream. But I understand that watching those hour and a half long programs is not the final word on the subject. I have some training that allows me to watch those documentaries with a disciplined historical lens. One of the main distinctions between film and history is that history seeks the truth, while film seeks to appease the viewer. Film is made to be understandable and engaging by the general public. To some degree, public history does this also.  The two are not synonymous, but there are some pieces of overlap.

Some of the limitations of documentaries are these:

• It is often the only introduction to history that some people have
• Most viewers are not privy to the intricacies of historical debate and find the historical themes confusing or boring
• The filmmaker must address the historian's concern for historiographical context or framework
• They present historical analysis as static, which misrepresents the complexity of historical work
• The evidence can be skewed by oral reports and casting
• There is not always visual evidence to support the film's vision

Documentaries are films that have a historical story line and use historical evidence to tell that story. Historians and filmmakers have to collaborate equally to ensure that history is represented in an honest and compelling way. I think that it's good to introduce the general public into the world of history, so long as they remember that watching The History Channel doesn't make them a Civil War expert. There are a lot of lay historian's in America, who are passionate and love history, but aren't professionally trained. As with any representation of history, it's important to critique the sources and take it with a grain of salt. This is particularly true when the medium has an agenda such as film does.

“The historian takes the available evidence, evaluates its significance, and provides some contextual meaning and broader historiographic insight. The goal for the filmmaker, on the other hand, is to first and foremost engage the audience in the principle of the “suspension of disbelief”, i.e. to create a filmatic reality that allows the audience to believe a story as if it were true – whether or not the story is factually correct in the whole part 118."

In response to the other two articles, I just have a few thoughts. I don't think that theatre is an appropriate medium for history. There are wonderful plays, like John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that accurately and emotionally convey the hardships of the Depression era, but those things aren't history in truth. It's the same artistic representation that is expressed in historic novels and movies. Ah, but isn't the point of history to represent it? To tell the story? I'm conflicted. I guess as a history discipline we have to strive for truth, and leave the art to others. 

I do believe that there is a way to actively, theatrically express history though, as the article suggests. Topics that are essential to public history such as "memory, identity, agency, archive/source, time and space, re-enactment, representation, and performance" are fantastic things to explore in theatre. I guess I'd say that I'm open to theatrical history, but I'd like to see it first hand. 

In the archives...

It seems like a lot happens in archives, even when nobody really knows it. Without this integral part of our society, historians and administrators alike would have a much harder time functioning. Archivists are like the hidden gems of information science, and I wouldn't call thems nerds, just enthusiastic information-buffs. To dedicate one's career to the preservation and care of information is a pretty cool thing, in my opinion.

Today's reading was out of Public History from the chapters, 'Archivists and Records Managers' and 'Administrators' as well as two public addresses from former Society of American Archivists (SAA) Presidents John A. Fleckner (1989-1999) and Steven L. Hensen (2001-2002). 

With the changing technology, the archival field has also changed. The introduction of computers and internet into everyday life has created a challenge for archives. Electronic data is easily lost to the black hole of cyberspace, and so it takes extra care to preserve it for future use. Electronic data also creates a larger amount of paper files that need to be housed in archives. The systems and formats for records needed to be completely redesigned to fit the new and changing information. Another challenge that archivists are facing is the lack of credibility (according to some) that their profession has. Graduate programs in library sciences and archival work have been on the rise, but that is a relatively new education path. In the past, archivists, like public historians, would have been trained by apprenticeship or not trained at all.

Administrators deal with a whole other realm of difficulties in their professions. Administrative positions can span across many disciplines, but in the field of public history, they prevail. In some situations, public history administrators will oversee a few dozen people, and in others, they will oversee only a few people. Regardless, their duties are similar. Being an administrator requires patience, passion, dedication, social-skills, and a commitment to seeing a job through. It's not easy work to be in charge of others or of a facility.  

Public History says this about administrators:

"Good administrators enjoy working with people; they are willing ot listen to various points of view and work hard to resolve conflict. They are successful in building consensus among staff, governing boards, and funding entities, but they are also capable of making tough decisions and taking decisive action when necessary. They are willing to put in a great deal of time and effort; they are resilient, streetwise, patient, and persistent. Above all, they know history; they love history; and they want to share their enthusiasm for learning about the past with wide audiences."

The two SAA addresses that we read were written in the same style; as letters to their graduate interns. Both were highly complementary of those particular interns. Fleckner and Hensen used that model to address a wider audience about their jobs as archivists and their love for history. Hensen, the president of SAA in 2001-02, addresses the technological innovation happening within the field. Because this address is now 12 years old, we can look with retrospect and see how the field has responded to new technological innovation.

I will end with an excerpt from Steven Hensen's address, to summarize this reading:

"But as I look at the new archivists that are coming into the profession..., I am struck by two thoughts: (1) your are by far the best-trained, most diverse, most technology adept, and committed group of archivists that I have ever seen; and (2) I'm certainly glad that, with my antiquated degrees and credentials, I'm not applying for a job today."