Southwest Oral History Conference links in progress
At the Southwest Oral History Association conference. This is my links in progress list of sites mentioned here. This post will continue to grow throughout the weekend as more sites get mentioned.
The Oral History on the Web Room on Friendfeed mentioned at the breakfast session (I created it, have a post in draft here, but not yet posted, w/ more explanation) but still. Go see it.
Twitter search results for #oralhistory (oral history in general) and #soha09 (the conference twitter feed)
King High Remembers Martin Luther King Jr High School does an annual event of interviewing veterans. Sunday morning, we heard from the teacher, Mr. Corona, who founded the project.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Links
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Countown to my Digital Audio Workshop
Am currently working hard to prepare for Friday’s “Birthing Digital” workshop at USC for the Southwest Oral History Association conference. What equipment am I bringing? Here’s a list.
YES, you can still sign up! (late fee waived!)
- Two Mac Laptops to demo and test all the direct-to-computer tools
- USB mic
- 2 USB Audio Interfaces: Edirol’s and M-Audio’s
- No wait, make that three. Creative Lab’s EEMU USB Audio Interface
- iPod Nano and Belkin TuneTalk, plus Belkin GoStudio. Or, everything you wanted to know about turning your iPod into an audio studio (or quick, stealthy recorder)
- M-Audio Microtrack II Portable Digital Recorder
- Samson’s Zoom Handy H2 Portable Digital Recorder*
- Marantz PMD 620 Portable Digital Recorder*
- LiveScribe Pulse Pen
- Possibly a Tascam portable recorder
- My own portable recording kit, as written about here
*A couple of these will be for sale, (very) gently used, in about 3 weeks’ time, once I’m finished with all my equipment tests
I expect to post lots of good info on audio recorders to this site in the weeks following this presentation.
Kevin Roderick at LA Observed mentioned the conference in this morning’s link roundup.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Audio
• Audio: Hardware
• Audio: Software
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High School students interview WWII vets
Reliving History My hometown paper, Daily Pilot’s cover story on my rival high school’s project bringing sophomores and World War II veterans together to share stories of the past.
Today, I’m visiting at a hospital near the home where I grew up. I go downstairs to the hospital lobby to post an update to a private family-only blog post about a certain hospital patient’s progress. (No wi-fi in the rooms, yes wi-fi in the first floor lounge) There in the lobby are copies of today’s paper. Shouting at me on the front page is a story about how students from my rival high school—Corona del Mar—has a project where... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Oral history in the news
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Photography changes what we remember
This 3.5 minute video (direct YouTube link; embedded below) is an interview with Hugh Talman, a photographer with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He muses on his act of photographing the aftermath of Katrina. The curator who was planning to visit the area asked him, “What would you photograph?” His reply: “you’d photograph the evidence of the power of Katrina. I don’t style myself as photojournalist, but it turned into having photojournalistic aspects to it.” The video shows some of his photos. Most striking: photographs of an object where it was found (in its full post-Katrina context), versus the object photographed the way Talman normally works with objects, shot in the sanitized setting of a photo studio. What a contrast.
Before I watched the video (and saw just its name—“changes what we remember”), I thought, “Oh, this might relate to photos and memories and how to use photos to nudge or direct memories.” Not so pointed as that. It’s more that a collection of photographs is a kind of memory artifact of how it was. The contrast between an object’s plain (studio) background versus that object in its environment so powerfully conveys the power of Katrina. The two photos of the same object may as well be two different objects. I’m inspired to hunt more carefully when I look at old photographs for objects and their contexts, and the clues they might provide about a person or a time. I’m thinking primarily about old family albums, but the same approach can be applied to any historical photograph collection.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Interviewing
• Photographs
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Wordless Wednesday: Doris rides Pete
Click to enlarge
Great Aunt Doris atop her horse, Pete. Found in letters among Christmas Cards. She hand colored this herself. More photos of Doris
Wordless Wednesday
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Personal History
• Photographs
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Fascinating Oral Histories Online
Twelve collections of online oral histories, described by Kimberly Powell (About.com Genealogy). From stories collected by the Federal Writers Projects, to slave narratives, to Japanese internment camps, the holocaust, war stories from the Veterans History Project, A southern cotton mill, and the southern United States, and Voices of Feminism. [via Pennington Research Online]
From Kimberly Powell’s introduction:
Even if you aren’t lucky enough to find your ancestor’s history preserved online, you can learn a lot about them by reading oral histories of their contemporaries - neighbors, people from the same ethnic community, individuals who had similiar experiences (e.g. same Japanese internment camp), etc. There is no better way to understand the history that you came from than through the words of the people who lived it first-hand.
To her list, I’ll add another one, the Big Daddy List of oral history collections, part of a larger collection of first-person narratives: In the First Person—search results for oral history repositories (60 results) and Collections (1019 results). “In the First Person In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world.”
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Online Oral History Collections
• Oral History Projects
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Writing plays about local events
What do you do after the stories have been recorded? This WaPo story about the Virginia Stage Company, who produces one play a year on a local theme. They develop or adapt the play with material emerges from community dialog. The current production, A Line in the Sand, is about a civil rights struggle fifty years ago as the local community grappled over the question, Will we prevent our schools from being racially integrated? The story hit my radar since the production from two years ago used oral histories from local people who took care of elders to adapt Shakespeare’s King Lear.
This news feature reminds me of the power of the story brought home, and my own sense of wonder at reading or hearing a story that has something to do with me, as opposed to the story that concerns some other person in some other life, whether the ancient Greeks, the renaissance, or some other strata of this society that I don’t belong to.
Those stories of Odysseus, Michelangelo, Galileo, Lincoln are all well and good, but I respond to... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Archiving
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Workshop in March on Portable Audio Recorders
In L.A. Friday, March 27, I’ll be presenting a workshop called for “Birthing Digital: Portable Digital Audio Recorders” for the Southwest Oral History Association’s Conference that afternoon. Location: USC. Register: Cost: SOHA members $35, Non-Members $50, Students $20. (+online registration fees). Short description: When an audio recording is initially stored as bits, bytes, ones and zeroes, it’s called “born digital.” The birthing begins with two people having a conversation. It ends with a digital audio file. This 3-hour workshop focuses on what happens in between. It’s part theory, part show and tell, and part practice using a glorious array of portable audio recorders.
Long Description:
The Theory:
An overview of the most common routes to go from spoken word to audio file. It will provide a framework to understand the myriad portable audio recorders available on the market. There will also be an introduction to some basics of audio, digital sampling, file formats, and concepts that underlie best recording practices.
The Show and Tell:
A look at many of the common portable audio recorders. Recorder types will include portable flash memory, portable internal... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Audio
• Audio: Hardware
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