Institute of Historical Research

Oral History Spring School

London Metropolitan University

11th, 12th and 13th April 2019

Day one

Paul Thompson, Joanna Bornat, Jenny Harding and Joel Morley are the course conveners for this 3 day Spring School. We started the session by introducing ourselves and giving a description of our current work. I was surprised that the majority of the people on the course are researchers/academics doing a PhD, only 3 out of 20 participants are oral historians/practitioners.

Paul Thompson began with a talk about how ‘oral history worldwide’ has taken different forms in different countries and has been shaped by varying approaches to research, specific national memories and cultures, and different forms of patronage.

Key points from my notes:

• 4th edition of Paul’s book The Voice of the Past now in print. Paul gave some information on 3 new chapters in his book.
• The core of OH is the experience for interviewer and interviewee. At the heart of OH these things stay the same:

1 - The crucial importance of listening - starting an interview from the listening perspective and not from your own agenda. OH not an exchange in the same way as a conversation although our instinct is to give back. The skill of the interviewer is learning to hold back, skill of respect and learning to listen in a deep way.

2 - Hidden voices and spheres of life - workers not bosses, those without a voice, history written without the inclusion of subjects - OH provides opportunity of subjects making their own history - don’t speak for me - ask me/record me, spheres of life particularly valuable such as children’s stories and parenthood which is still largely undocumented.

3 - The importance of memory - too much recent focus on how memories are stored and recounted, lose sight of the value of memory. Alessandro Portelli leading in this field. OH has double value as memory not just a source of information on life experience but gaps/false memory evidence of how consciousness is changing.

• What’s changed? Decline in community studies, illness narratives, life writing, memory studies, disaster narratives, audiovisual technology, digital economy,
• Exciting aspects? Awareness of world wide scene, different forms of oral history driven by cultural and political history, patronage and funding.
• Other research traditions: the life story competition, the German narrative interview, the political Latin American testimony, and the colonial research tradition.

Joel Morley then led a short session taking up some of the challenges and questions we posed in our posters (which we had to submit prior to the course) and opening them up for group discussion to compare experiences and approaches.

Some of the questions we discussed:

‘How personal should you/could you go in an interview. Is it appropriate to delve into emotions when it may not relate to your project theme/research objective?’

‘How do you structure an interview well?’

‘How do you deal with the situation when you as an interviewer are asked questions about yourself or your opinion by your interviewee?’

‘How do you successful record an interview with more than one interviewee?’

‘Who should be in control in the interview. The interview or the interviewer?’

After lunch Joel then discussed ‘Representativeness and Generalisability’. Key points from my notes:

• how common or typical are attitudes and experiences? do they tell us about the bigger picture or just a single experience?
• how you select interviewees can make your work more representative
• do people who think they’ve had an interesting life some forward when you put out a call for interviewees? What about those who don’t feel they have anything of value to share? How does the way you recruit shape your interviewees?
• different types of sampling - quota, snowball, stratified,
• to make generalisations your interviews need to be representative
• not always possible to be representative depending on the study ie; may be fixed by geographical location.
• need to retain uniqueness of each interview whilst generalising and talked about how broad or representative conclusions can be drawn from one or multiple interviews, often discussing subjective experiences, is an important one for oral historians.
• we then compared 2 extracts and shared our reactions to the interpretation of the oral testimony and concluded that what’s produced as an outcome of analysis of testimony is a historian’s interpretation.

After tea Joanna Bornat led on ‘Analysing the data: drawing out evidence’ and helped us to understand why we analyse oral history data. Key points from my notes:

• who owns it in the end?
• are you giving a voice to people to then re-write their story to be used and moulded for your purposes as a historian?
• power of the interviewer to articulate the ‘inarticulate’
• why do we need analyse? Because analysis is a way of communicating content, explain and theorise, share and add to knowledge, honouring of the interviewee words and memories
• 3 approaches - narrative, biographical interpretive method, reconstructive cross analysis
• transcripts can be manipulated and done differently and this can affect analysis and interpretation, transcripts lack emotional content, take you further away from original speaker, what’s best is probably closest to the original spoken word.

General thoughts and questions which I noted during the day:

• What role does the interviewer play in shaping the interview?
• Is there a disadvantage to formal interviews with minimal input from the interviewer, is an interviewee put at greater ease when the interviewer plays a greater part and offers something of themselves?
• How do you ensure parity in interviews when you are working with volunteers on a project? Issues of ‘quality assurance’.
• How much of a life story should be available for public consumption? Does the fact OH is archived and is available for public listening shape what people say/are prepared to reveal?
• Selectivity in interviews - holding back, exaggerating, omitting, presenting in a certain way - does this make OH less reliable/more controversial?
• Is there value in interviewing for its own sake, for the benefit of the interviewee? Or should it always be for ‘history’.
• Is there a juxtaposition between research/theme/project outcome V memories shared. Is an interview ever truly interviewee led?
• Making mistakes as an interviewer, very important to keep control of subject matter, don’t ask the wrong questions, don’t lose the respect of your interviewee.

Day two

We started with a really interesting session on ‘Emotion’ with Jenny Harding. Key points from my notes:

• Emotion is part of the texture of an interview, it arises when you build rapport and have empathy with your interviewee.
• Inflection, tone and volume can reflect emotion - facial expression, gestures, pauses, crying all evidence of emotion.
• Is emotion in an interview something to ask about and investigate?

Emotion in culture - oral history part of teling the story of the emotional aspect of memory. Shift in interview styles to finding out more about what people felt and not just what happened. Does emotion put a focus on the individual at the expense of the collective?

Emotion in academia - philosophers questioning inequalities and hierarchies and why they’ve become so entrenched. ‘Reasoning’ seen as a way of working through problems (male/mind), its opposite is ‘emotion’ (female/body) - dualism. Alison Jagger concept of emotional hegemony (leadership/dominance). Reason and emotion can’t be separated, a more current way of thinking.

• Does emotion allow us to see the real person? Are emotions made through social interactions? Do they stay the same across time and culture? Are emotions universal? Anthropologists would say no.
• Oral history provides unique opportunities to enquire about emotions and capture verbal and non-verbal expressions of emotion.
• Joanna gives 3 examples of emotion - 1. Jo Stanley interwar ship stewardesses - comes back to the theme to analyse emotion, study raised ethical issues of misinterpretation of words and over analysis of how interviewees felt (too much reading between the lines which can be intrusive and arrogant). 2. Care stories - what young people leaving care felt about being looked after, emotion as topic and texture. 3. Refugees community history project - empowering people and engendering sense of pride in their lives, countering negative stereotypes. Here we listened to a clip of an interview and discussed its significance.
• Oral histories exploration of emotions can reveal lived experiences often missing from other accounts and sources. How do you register emotion in a transcript? (Brackets can be used to describe ie; laughs/crys, can also provide further detail in field notes/interview summary), this does present difficulties in analysis, should always return to the original recording.

Group discussion on emotion, group divided into two. We were asked if we had experienced the sharing of emotion by an interviewee in an interview. We talked about different types of emotion which can be unlocked in an interview - happiness, sadness, pride, regret, anger, despair, relief, guilt, grief, sorrow. What is your responsibility if emotion is unlocked, what if wounds are re-opened as part of the process, what if a disclosure is made? What support could be provided? Therapeutic but not therapy - cathartic nature of oral history in the time and space given to your interviewee.

After lunch ‘Re-use: issues from the secondary analysis of archived interviews’ with Joanna Bornat. Key points from my notes:

• The re-use or secondary analysis of archived oral history interviews, debated practice in the last few years. With thousands of hours of recorded interviews in archives and given the highly competitive funding situation, a turn to already created data seems both desirable and inevitable. Does re-use creates new data or new knowledge? What ethical considerations arise from re-use? Improving access is key.
• Millennium memory bank collection at British Library. Lindsey Dodd childhoods of wartime. Cross discussion, analyse from different academic perspectives. Is oral history still too much about fact, should we also not think about what’s not said and what this reveals?
• Challenges - funding effects types and forms of collections as different projects/studies have different objectives, some collections do not tackle neglected themes and are predominantly white male, ethical issues around documentation, GDPR, web technology, public access and rights of individuals in older interviews.
• Current HLF nationwide project to improve access to historic collections of audio heritage ‘Unlocking our sound heritage’.

Joel Morley then led a session on ‘ethics’. This session focuses on ethical considerations at all stages of the oral history research process. Key points from my notes:

• No laws regarding the collecting of oral history, just guidelines/best practice (apart from Copyright law)
• Benefits to interviewees - contribution to research, opportunity to talk, reflection and life review. Benefit to interviewer - research fuller, better understanding of subject
• How can we increase benefits to interviewees - space for reflection, don’t misrepresent, keeping people up to date with how their recording will be used, providing a copy of the recording/transcript, sharing authority.
• Should interviewer retain power over final interpretation if the interview has shared authority?
• Fundamental duties - confidentiality (if interviewee wants something to remain confidential we need to ensure it is), informed consent (project information sheet, pre and post interview agreement - new GDPR regulations), approval from HE/NHS ethics boards if relevant.
• How do we find interviewees and are their ethical considerations here? Selection should be as representative as possible and not discriminatory.
• Disclosures in interviews, should third persons have a right to know? If someone is defamed interviewer and interviewee could be sued. Be mindful with internet access.
• GDPR applies to organisations collecting data, increased attention to sensitive data of living parties, including 3rd parties. Need to be cautious of sensitive data if can ‘cause harm’.

Discussion on ethics raised a number of points -’licence to use’ as an equivalent for interviewees wishing to retain their copyright, secure storage, deletion of sensitive sections of interview with interviewees permission before archiving is acceptable practice.

Day three

We started the day with a session from Joel on ‘Outputs and impacts’. In this session we discussed the use of oral history in a range of contexts. Key points from my notes:

• Oral history creates sources.
• Benefit for the individual (sometimes, not often at the forefront), difficult to measure - can be cathartic, brings people together, value in being recognised, confirmation of sense of worth, being listened to, being part of making history, sense of belonging and pride, company.
• Impact limited if interview isn’t accessible. Archival deposition increases potential impact. Where projects are archived will determine the amount of access provided - ie; record office, museum, university, local heritage centre. Think about sensitivities and how access may need to be restricted.
• Other ways to share through publication - academic journals, essays, articles, books; websites (enable the widest possible access but there are challenges - good examples Rugby League, TUC library collection, Foundling Voices, MoL London Voices); exhibitions (engaging, interactive, community focused); creative interpretations (arts element, potential for collaboration, audio tours - Toby Butler, Graham Miller, Simon Bradley); documentary formats (podcasts, radio broadcasts); conference; online archive software (Omeka).

Jenny then led a session on ‘Funding bodies’ and outlined the key funding bodies:

• Heritage Lottery Fund, now the National Lottery Heritage Fund for community based projects.
• Academic research councils AHRC, ESRC.
• Focus on areas of impact - benefits of UK economy, improving public service, enhancing quality of life and wellbeing.
• Examples of HLF projects - highfell.com, rainbowjews.com, MoL refugees community history project, sporting sisters.
• Bid writing - who will benefit and how, impact summary. Social benefits, opportunities for learning. volunteering.
• Other project examples - Memories of Fiction, Mr Seal’s Garden, In search of a hidden landscape.
• Change - effect - benefit.
• How is impact assessed and measured? Quantitative and qualitative.

After lunch we went on a visit as a group to the Museum of London to investigate the use of oral history in museums. We explored the museum as group. We discovered several uses of oral history in the People’s City and World City history galleries and thought the most effective use was when there was a combination of oral and visual sources to explore - for example memories of the Blitz coupled with a large audio-visual screen with photographs and film footage. I also really liked the exhibit where you could choose on a touchscreen the interviews you’d like to watch which were videoed oral history interviews of individuals talking about LGBT issues.

We had a discussion over coffee a number of topics:

• Access to MoL interviews - how do we find about about all the interviews conducted as there only seem to be a small number of interviews available for access in exhibits? this is probably the case in most museums where testimony is chosen to enhance gallery themes and interpretation?
• Creation of a national database of oral history, this would be really useful for researchers to find out what exists and where its archived.
• Museum audiences, museums are making exhibitions with audiences in mind, are they local people or tourists, this could influence design.
• How more oral histories could be used in the galleries to make for exciting, vibrant, personal (linking objects to people who have stories to share about them) community based displays.

It was an interesting journey home digesting everything I’ve learnt over this intense 3 day Spring School. So much to consider in terms of my own practice and the possible direction I see my work heading in over the next few years. I made a couple of good contacts through the course and intend to pursue these for more information on their work and share ideas about how to do oral history well!