Digital Arts & Humanities - Scholarly Reflections - James O'Sullivan

See: “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal
Writers’ Project, 1936-1938,” Library of Congress, .
[3] When full interviews are placed in an online archive, there is
limited editing, selection, or interpretation by the researcher,
especially compared to publishing transcripts in a book. Of
course, to a certain degree the historian or researcher will
always control the discourse through selecting the contributors
and asking the questions, but a life story approach to interviews
can minimize this intervention.
[4] Examples of current projects include Archival Sound
Recordings at the British Library, Denshō: The Japanese
American Legacy Project, Digital Collections at the Library of
Congress, The Doegen Records Web Project / Tionscadal
Gréasáin Cheirníní Doegen at the Royal Irish Academy, and the
Lifescapes project at Trinity College Dublin.
[5] While there is much to be said for capturing facial
expressions and gestures on video, in practice I personally
prefer to use only an audio recording device when carrying out
interviews. I find it easier to help the interviewee relax (and for
me to relax) when there is only a small digital audio recorder
sitting on the table, rather than a video camera pointed in the
subject’s face. This does limit the meaning preserved within the
recording to the ‘oral’, but it still preserves much more than a
written transcript.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Andy Bielenberg, Michael
Dwyer and Luke Kirwan for their comments and suggestions on
an earlier draft of this essay.
Works Cited
Beiner, Guy & Anna Bryson. “Listening to the Past and Talking
to Each Other: Problems and Possibilities Facing Oral History
in Ireland.” Irish Economic & Social History 30 (2003): 71-8.
Print.
Cohen, Daniel J., Michael Frisch, et al. “Interchange: The
Promise of Digital History.” Journal of American History 95.2
(Sept. 2008): 452-91. Print.
De Ruyver, Debra & Jennifer Evans. “Digital Junction.”
American Quarterly 58. 3 (Sept. 2006): 943-80. Print.
Frisch, Michael. “Oral History and the Digital Revolution:
Toward a Post-Documentary Sensibility.” The Oral History
Reader. Ed. Robert Perks & Alastair Thomson, 2nd ed. London
& New York: Routledge, 2006. 102-14. Web. Dec. 2011.
-----. Frisch, Michael. “Three Dimensions and More: Oral
History Beyond the Paradoxes of Method.” The Handbook of
Emergent Methods. Ed. Sharlene Hesse-Bibe & Patricia Leavy.
New York: Guilford Press, 2008. Web. Dec. 2011.
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