Doug Boyd finishes his chapter in the book, Oral history and Digital Humanities, with an anecdote about his daughter coming across a box of cassettes and not recognising the analogue media. After Boyd explains what the tapes were and how they were used, she simply replies “I just want to click on it to listen” [p. 95]. This is an excellent example of how developments in technology affect the idea of access and also the shape of the physical structure. Where before you had to go to a record shop to buy a CD, cassette, or Vinyl, now nearly all music is available to you via the comfort of your phone. Similarly, you had to travel to an archive to access recordings, whereas now increasingly oral histories and other archival material is expected to be available online (especially after the Covid-19 pandemic). The idea that access should be instant has resulted in the structure of oral history repositories moving from shelves to servers.
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At the start of this project I grappled with the tension between digital spaces and archival spaces. It was not until I started writing my critical commentary that I fully conceptualised what this tension was – a difference in access. Our idea of access has changed a lot over the years due to the evolution of technology.
Throughout my practice I came across all the different ways our changing idea of access has made maintaining access to oral histories a wicked problem.
OHD_GRP_0176 My PhD in a graphic. I did a seminar based off this image (OHD_WRT_0202)
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During a writing workshop I was tasked with drawing my PhD (OHD_GRP_0176). The graphic represents all the different points of change that occur within the setting of oral history: technologies change, ethics change, and attitudes change.
In theory if each of these points of change are managed the access to the oral history is maintained. However, as this comment in a zoom lecture (OHD_SSH_0146) demonstrates this is not what always happens. There are many digital “folios fallen behind books stacks” like the dead links I repeatedly came across in my research.
OHD_COL_0262 My first audit during my British Library placement, note the mini-disc
Chpt. 01 – The History of Oral History Technology
“The history of progress is littered with experimental failures.”
– Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World
Let is take a moment to contemplate the MiniDisc. Developed by Sony in 1992, it was meant to replace the cassette, with its ability to edit and rewrite recordings, and 60 – 80 minutes audio storage, it was the hot new thing that was going to change how we record forever. Fast forward thirty years or so and the MiniDisc has become one of the textbook examples of a failed technology. For oral historians and sound archivists the promises made by the Minidisc were never fulfilled but for different reasons. For oral historians it was difficult to use when recording, and for sound archivists it was incompatible with certain editing and storage softwares, and sharing files was not universally possible (Perks, 2012).
OHD_WRT_0172 start of a draft chapter on oral history technology
And sometimes you have no idea why something is not working.
OHD_SSH_0307 Screenshot of my access being blocked to the Northumberland Archive catalogue
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The various technologies designed to make oral histories more accessible were plagued by all these issues, which I wrote about in OHD_WRT_0135 and OHD_WRT_0172.
My working theory became that these incidents and mishaps were the result of limit or maintenance, as I discuss in After the interview.
Eventually maintenance became my central topic as demonstrated in a document I made for Archives at NCBS containing all things that you need to consider when designing or updating the technology that allows access to oral histories.
Tech options for making oral history recordings accessible
V1. January 30 2023
Hannah James Louwerse, Archives at NCBS
Making oral history recordings accessible to people has been infamously difficult, with the oral historian Michael Frisch referring to the issue as “oral history’s deep dark secret”. There have been many attempts to solve this problem with some being more successful than others. By analysing the history of oral history technologies one can see how using technology to access to oral history recordings depends on three factors: maintenance, ethics, and user-friendliness. This short report will go through each of these factors bringing examples of oral history technologies to explain what you should look for when seeking a solution to putting oral history recordings online
1. Maintenance
Maintenance is often the biggest killer of solutions to the deep dark secret of oral history. Maintenance depends on a continuous supply of money and labour, which is not always easy to get hold of, especially within grant cycles. It is therefore essential to think about the maintenance necessary to sustain a technology which allows access to oral history recordings. How you do this depends on the source of the technology and how it was developed.
1.1 Tailor-made, in house development and maintenance
Creating your own digital oral history archiving system allows it to be perfectly tailor to your collections needs. However, it also means the maintenance of this system is solely in your hands, which can be very risky, especially when working within grant cycles. Projects like the Visual Oral/Aural History Archive (VOAHA) created by Sherna Berger Gluck at California State University, Long Beach and Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database developed by Doug Boyd built tailor-made technologies specifically for their existing oral history collections, either developing the technology themselves or hired someone to do it for them. At the time they were the height of technology, but when the money ran out there was none left to maintain the archives/databases. Both VOAHA and Boyd’s Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database were “digitally abandoned” and left vulnerable to inevitable technical obsolescence and online hackers (Boyd and Larson, 2014, p. 7; Boyd, 2014, p. 90). In the end the two projects were absorbed by their respective universities’ libraries.
1.2 Use existing specialist oral history software
By using specialist oral history software, the maintenance is no longer your responsibility, which is both a risk and a benefit. The benefit is how it is a cheaper option in comparison to hiring someone full time to take care of the technology. But the risk is that the software developer stops maintaining the software, which is what happen in the case of Stories Matter, an oral history software developed by the Centre of Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University and a software engineer from Kamicode software (High, 2010; Jessee, Zembrycki, and High, 2011). The Kamicode website still has a page on Stories Matter, but the software is not downloadable. The reason for this is unclear, however it is easy to imagine the maintaining of such niche software is unlikely to be a high priority for a software company.
A more successful example of specialist oral history software is Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), developed by Doug Boyd after his reflections on Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Oral History Project Digital Media Database. OHMS has been in existence for some years and is a popular way for oral history projects and archives to organise their oral history metadata and link the video/audio file to a searchable text. Unlike Stories Matter, OHMS is developed and maintained by people who are interested in oral history and use it for their own projects. Maintaining OHMS is therefore in their own interest.
1.3 Use existing mainstream third party platforms
Another cheaper option is using more mainstream platforms such as Soundcloud or Spotify. These are less niche technologies and therefore do not have the benefits more specialised software has, but the maintenance is pretty much guaranteed since these platforms are universally used. Certain projects have created Spotify playlists and other have Soundcloud versions of their recordings alongside the original files in the brick-and-mortar archive.
2. Ethics
The internet is an ethical nightmare and putting someone’s personal story online in an ethical manner is not an easy task. The starting point will always be clear communication to the interviewees on how people will be able to access their recording, and thorough paperwork which accompanies the recording. Following this there are a couple of other things people have done to support the ethical handling of oral history recordings.
2.1 Extracts
The simplest of ethical practices is to only make certain extracts available online. This means you can avoid putting online more sensitive information but still give an example to the archive visitor of the kind of content the oral history holds. If the archive visitor wishes to hear more, they can request the full recording via email. A possible consequence of this might be people only using the online extract and not bother enquiring any further because it is deemed as “too much effort.”
2.2 End user agreement
Archives like Trove and Centre for Brooklyn History have “end user agreements” the archive visitor must agree to before they are allowed access to the oral history recording. These end user agreements contain information on basic copyright and data rights, a disclaimer about the opinions expressed in the recording, and outline the archive user’s obligations. These obligations include correctly citing the recording, adhering copyright law and data protection law. These end user agreements are a way for archives to hold users accountable in case of misuse or rights violations.
3. User-friendliness
People have a low tolerance of bad user-experience design. The software Interclipper, championed by Michael Frisch was reviewed during the development of Stories Matter and VOAHA and was deemed difficult to use in both instances (Jessee, Zembrycki, and High, 2011; Gluck, 2014). It no longer exists. OHMS offers both a backend metadata synchronizer and a viewer, the latter however is often left in favour of an in-house interface design. Project Jukebox developed by the University of Alaska in collaboration with Apple Computers Inc. in the 1990s, is still available online but still looks like it was made in the 90s, even though at the time it was described as “a fantastic jump into space age technology” (Lake, 1991, p. 30). It is therefore important the user experience and interface are updated as fashions and taste evolve across the wider internet.
Boyd, D.A. (2014) ““I Just Want to Click on It to Listen”: Oral History Archives, Orality, and Usability” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 77-96. Palgrave Macmillan: New York
Boyd, D.A. and Larson, M. (2014) “Introduction” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 1-16. Palgrave Macmillan: New York
Gluck, S.B. (2014) “Why do we call it oral history? Refocusing on orality/aurality in the digital age” in Oral History and Digital Humanities. pp. 35-52. Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
High, S. (2010) “Telling stories: A reflection on oral history and new media” in Oral History. 38(1), pp.101-112
Jessee, E., Zembrzycki, S. and High, S. (2011) “Stories Matter: Conceptual challenges in the development of oral history database building software” In Forum: Qualitative Social Research. 12(1)
Lake, G.L. (1991) “Project Jukebox: An Innovative Way to Access and Preserve Oral History Records” in Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists. 9(1), pp.24-41
Smith, S. (Oct 1991) “Project Jukebox: ‘We Are Digitizing Our Oral History Collection… and We’re Including a Database.’” at The Church Conference: Finding Our Way in the Communication Age. pp. 16 – 24. Anchorage, AK
However, even then you never know what the future has in store.
In November 2020 I wrote a blog post (OHD_BLG_0095) about a computer being able to write my PhD by ingesting the archive I was creating. Two years later I could actually test this theory with ChatGPT. I do not wish to test it again now, although I did have a play around with summarising interviews (OHD_WRT_0251).
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ChatGPT test
Me testing if an AI chat bot could write my PhD. It could not.
digital ; AI ; ChatGPT
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“if you don’t believe that you are a cyborg let me take your phone away and then you will realise that you are a cyborg.”
We have our bodies (physical health), our brains (mental health), and our digital extensions (digital health). If we are cyborgs then it only makes sense that we look after the robot part of ourselves. Especially because that robot part is only going to grow over time (sadly).
Some years after the advancement of technology come the laws and rule, sometimes as a consequence of an incident.
For example the book of Seaton Delaval Hall stories my Masters group made during our final project is an absolute violation of data protection, as we simply took screenshots of Facebook comments with people’s full names. I would never think of making such a thing now.
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My first work with the ethics and paperwork of oral history was during my placement at Seaton Delaval Hall. However, due to time constraints, other design work, and unexpected room guiding I was not able to cover all ethics. I was given another chance to explore ethics and rules during both my other placements at Archives at NCBS and the British Library.
At Archives at NCBS I created their Takedown policy as well as their Sensitivity check documents.
At the British Library I did an audit of the recordings to see which had the correct copyright, giving me an insight into how our idea of copyright and oral history has changed over the decades.
