As will surprise precisely no one who came to our session at OHA2012, I’d like us to consider an exploration of core metadata elements and controlled vocabularies for describing oral history.  I think this may dovetail with the discussion on the “unit of analysis” of digital oral history.

Hello:

I would be interested in a session on adding geospatial information, which would allow locating and collocating digital oral histories on such maps as HistoryPin.  Given its timeline feature, it may support establishing relationships between recordings and other digital content.  In the Veterans History Project, geographical locations are provided for the location service — albeit very generally, such as Korean War, Vietnam War — and the interviewees’ state of residence, but this is less clear for World War I and II topics.  If Digital History aims at providing such data at a greater granularity, specifics should be added, which would provide historians with additional leads to support research on very specific topics.  However, not all oral histories (I mean both the recording and transcript) may be published digitally if the interviewees do not agree to such publications, so a more diversified strategy may be needed.   For recordings with permissions, the geo-tags and other key words should adequately describe the media.  If the transcript is also published (with the interviewees’ and interviewers’ permission), perhaps TEI should be used to add the geo-location in body of the transcript as well.  This approach will require extensive textual analysis, but it may well be worthwhile.  For oral histories without either the transcripts or recording or both accessible online, the catalog record should contain this information in greater detail, and researchers may still be able to listen to the recordings, read transcripts, and develop a map with geographical locations mentioned in the interviews. The MARC standard used by libraries,  EAD in use at archives, and the various metadata schemas like Dublin Core have fields for geographic locations to accommodate such enhancements.  I hope to see an interdisciplinary group of archivists, digital historians, geographers, and librarians in such a session if possible.