I am fascinated with the problems associated with visualizing oral history, which I blogged about, and which is part of my contribution to the Oral History in the Digital Age project.

As I have mulled this problem, I have increasingly realized that the digital revolution presents a problem for oral historians that problematizes the oral history as the unit of analysis. Increasingly, we parse, divide, tag, and work with oral histories as a small collection of discreet pieces or clips. This surely is an appropriate way to work with oral history, but has just as surely altered how we think about oral history as a unit of analysis. This transformation has generated a host of new tools, such as Ohms at the University of Kentucky. It has also become the way that public historians are using oral history, as in Cleveland Historical.

I would like to consider examples of projects in both the archiving and exhibition of oral history and engage in a discussion of what this implies about professional practice in the digital age.