AFRC670 - Oral History

From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century, a process that is ongoing in the present. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli's Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians, and we will discuss public history approaches, such as the video recordings collected by the Library of Congress's Civil Rights History Project and other internet-based collections. This course centers on methodology - students will learn about 'best practices' in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers. All students will use digital video and will practice creating accessible links to both video and audio material, although the interviewees involved may choose an audio-only format. NOTE: Each person interviewed maintains rights to the interview material unless she or he explicitly donates those rights to an archive. Interviewees' privacy and intellectual property rights will be respected by all seminar participants.