Let’s add educational materials here!  Please email me (natalie.milbrodt@queenslibrary.org) attachments of your syllabi or workshop outlines.  You can also post good workshop exercises in the comments section of this post.

Queens College undergraduate oral history course This course was co-taught by an English professor and an Archives Professor with help from me (Natalie) to get students ready to create interviews for donation to the Queens Memory Project.

Queens College undergraduate Sociology research methods course This is an outline for a six-session oral history curriculum module training students to conduct interviews about food and healing traditions that will become part of the Queens Memory Project.

Uploading a podcast (sound) file to a webpage.

I would like to add pieces of student interviews to a webpage.  Many use their iphones, and I am thinking that I could easily put up interviews for class purposes.

I am a novice, so here I have just done the basics of creating a podcast and uploading it to my webpage.

I’m somewhat new to web publishing. I have been to an Omeka workshop but wouldn’t mind a refresher. Also, it would be great to learn any new outlets for oral history display and publishing, especially low-budget.

As a beginning practitioner of oral history, I’d like to take advantage of THATcamp to assemble some do’s and don’ts of organizing oral history projects in support of public history pedagogy generally and the Curatescape application specifically.   Many of the workshops suggested sound profitable in answering questions about collaboration, creative re-use, etc.  Although we’ve only worked on a few oral history projects at Allegheny, we’re already running into problems with compatible formats, archiving and access.   Rather than just jumping in on my project with some solution that will work for the moment, I’d like to come up with some ways that lay solid foundations and make it possible for the oral histories to be useful resources beyond my immediate project.  I’m especially interested in setting up a system that utilizes undergraduate interns on an on-going basis in a summer program for which we’re getting funding.  Perhaps a panel might consist of you experts answering such questions as:  if I were starting over again I would be sure to do ____.  Or, more helpfully, boy would I never again do ____.    Some of my questions will be answered by my sitting in on other sessions, or we could take some time out to create a list of suggestions of best practices that consolidate what we’ve learned.

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.

According to the Omeka web site:

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.

So, does that mean I can use it for my projects?

I plan to do an overview of Omeka, what you need to install it, how you can use it, how you can create web sites.

Omeka is widely used in the digital humanities. Come and see if it can work for you.

I’ve become very curious and excited recently about how corporations, nonprofits, and others are using social media, in particular different social media sites, for marketing a specific part of a product or project. I’m curious if anyone is interested in examining how from its inception an oral history project can use various social media websites to do pre-marketing, real time marketing, and post marketing to keep up interest in a project. So for example, creating a Facebook page that syncs with a Twitter feed to give instant updates about the design and plan for an oral history project, while Soundcloud, Timblr, and Pinterest could each have different parts of a digital oral history project linked to each other. So for example a wav or mp3 file could be put on soundcloud, a blog with photographs could be on Tumblr, while unique pinboards could be created on Pinterest.

Do this sound interesting to anybody?

I would like to form a session of those interested in discussing experiences with building an oral history collection whose primary function is to support a specific digital project. In my own experience working with colleagues, students, and community groups through CSU’s Center for Public History + Digital Humanities, we set up many of the nearly 800 oral histories that we have conducted with the explicit purpose of creating sound clips to use on the mobile history app we have been developing (as well as for a prior project). In doing so, we have, nonetheless, striven to adhere to best practices in oral history, ranging from archiving interviews to creating a space for our interviewees to tell their own stories whether they fit our ends or not. In at least one sense, our project-driven methodology, which places a premium on high-quality, uninterrupted personal narratives, may actually have enabled us to do a better job of being mindful of fostering such an environment.

Loosely related to the issues above, I am interesting in sharing experiences with others who have trained students or community members to conduct oral histories. In this, perhaps unsurprisingly, my experience has been mixed. A host of factors account for the challenges of transferring oral history skills to those who have never conducted an interview. Given the time constraints of the typical university semester, logistics of identifying interview subjects, scheduling, using recording equipment, finding suitable space, etc., have you developed any tried-and-true methods for producing robust results? I am also happy to share how I am guiding students to create digital projects (and why for the time being I have stopped having my students conduct oral histories). A selfish hope I’ll share is that I hope to be inspired to return project-driven oral history collecting to the center of some of my teaching in the not-too-distant future.

I’m a volunteer at the Oberlin Heritage Center in Oberlin.  I’ve been collecting video interviews for over 20 years and would like to discover ways to save these in our collections in usable formats.  We also have an extensive collection of analog audio tapes that we want to transfer to digital format efficiently.  We do have a number of volunteers and an active oral history committee.

I would be comfortable talking about my experience interviewing individuals on video and video editing but would like to exchange info about the process of digital archiving and switching to new digital recording format.

I’m thinking most right now about ways to invite and encourage the creation of oral histories and other documentary records for the archives by a huge variety of participants while maintaining rigorous professional and scholarly standards in my institution’s practices.  In other words:

How do we strike a balance between making participation appealing and simple while maintaining quality control over the records we’re collecting?

I would really enjoy learning more about the ways other THATCampers have mobilized participants new to oral history and digital archives to produce wonderful contributions.

After the first year of developing and starting an oral history project, I felt immediately pressured for more, more MORE! While I was done and happy for the year; the initial interviews and photos were now stored, they would one day be archived, and the project would continue the following year, the students and seniors and those in my university community seemed surprised that, that was it. So, I started using the photographs and audio from the interviews in order to create an annual video recap. (The second year, I got a lot fancier.) This has managed to drum up support from all angles, and they are very fun to show, but it is not the direction I originally saw for the project. I would love to explore how others have reconstituted their oral histories, why we’ve done it, how we’ve done it and the pros and cons of doing so.

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.

I believe that playing back digital video on the web presents a special set issues for scholars, content managers and technologists that are not often addressed in commercial products and on websites, such as YouTube, that focus primarily on entertainment not education, research or public exhibits. Using digital video in these areas requires the ability to segment videos, provide voice or text based annotation and the presentation of the segments in the context of the original video as well as the ability to present video segments and annotation with other related videos. In addition, since much of this work is done in the context of a library, museum or other public facility or project, and often requires some search and discovery of the video segments, the ability to collect and present metadata about each segment is important as well.  In relation to work that I have done on a plugin and themes that allow the loading and playback of videos and video segments into Omeka, I would like to discuss the current state of video segment playback and some of the choices that have to be made when playing back video on the web.

Hey all, I was thinking that a session on using sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo to fund an oral history project might be interesting. I don’t know if anyone who’s going to be attending has tried crowdfunding (I haven’t) but I’m interested in thinking as a group about how this might work in practice.

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.

NOTE: the following is a re-post of an email sent to attendees. It is posted here for quick reference by late registrants, organizers, etc…

I hope you are all looking forward to THATCamp Oral History, which is coming up soon!

Unlike most events you’ll attend at the Oral History Association Annual Meeting, THATCamp requires you to not only participate in each session, but to plan ahead and begin sharing and collaborating before we even meet.

One of the essential parts of a successful THATCamp is the event blog. Ours is at oha2012.thatcamp.org. Each of you have an account here and are expected to create a blog post describing what you would like to discuss when we meet on Saturday. Before or after you make your own post, you should also read others’, leave comments, introduce yourself, and begin thinking about which proposals sound the most interesting to you.

Not only will this allow us to begin our conversations early, and help us get to know one another, it is also the only method we have for creating a schedule on the day of the event. I repeat, without your blog post, the entire plan will break down. But no pressure or anything.

So here’s what each of you should do in the days leading up to THATCamp.

1. Log-in to the site at: oha2012.thatcamp.org/wp-admin/
2. Edit your profile at: oha2012.thatcamp.org/wp-admin/profile.php
3. Read posts and leave comments at: oha2012.thatcamp.org/session-posts/
4. Write a post describing your own session, discussion, or panel.

The first 2 are pretty easy, so don’t wait to get in there and edit your profile. You can probably check this off in under 5 minutes. Simply add your full name, a short bio, a link to your stuff (a website and/or twitter account), and a profile image. You can view your fellow campers’ profiles at: oha2012.thatcamp.org/campers/

Many people have a harder time writing their session proposal/post on the blog. The best advice I can give is to not worry too much about the details. THATCamp is a very informal event. Just use your post to present an idea, or even a nugget of an idea, that you would like to pursue at THATCamp. Jim Calder wrote a nice post on the blog, “Getting the most out of an unconference,” that may help guide your thinking on the event and your session proposal.

You can view current session proposals at oha2012.thatcamp.org/session-posts/

When we meet on Saturday morning, we will scribble session titles into a grid on a giant sheet of paper. You will sign your name next to sessions that interest you and we will use this to create the day’s schedule. It will look something like this: www.flickr.com… It will all be very analog and very hectic and maybe even a little bit exciting.

Similar proposals may be grouped together to create joint sessions. So if you are hesitant to present on your own, you can even note potential points of collaboration in your proposal. (As in, “my topic fits nicely with what Jane Doe has already proposed, so here is how I’d like to join in and add to that dialogue…”).

Again, don’t overthink it. This is a fun event, meant to spark conversations and connections. We might solve a few problems along the way, but don’t feel you need to arrive with all the answers. All that’s required is a positive attitude and active participation. That participation should begin today with your blog post, your feedback in the form of comments, and maybe even with making some new friends on Twitter and tweeting with the #THATCamp hashtag (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Please get in touch if you need a hand using the website or have any other questions. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to reading your posts and meeting you all at the event!

Hi everyone, I wrote this awhile ago and thought I’d share.  Hopefully this will be helpful for anyone new to the unconference format.  More information is available here: www.digitalculture.org/hacking-the-academy/hacking-institutions/

Getting the most out of an unconference | James Calder

Over the past couple of years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to attend several “unconferences”, both locally and nationally. I say fortunate because these experiences have opened my eyes to how amazing the unconference format can be. I cannot think of a better way to share ideas, make personal and professional connections and generally have an extremely productive yet enjoyable time. That being said, the unconference format can be challenging and confusing, especially for those used to a more traditional conference model. Sharing some of my unconference experiences might make things a little easier.

Participation

Participation is by far the most important factor in determining whether or not an unconference will be successful. For the organizer, it is essential to get people together that truly want to be involved. For the attendee, an unconference is one of those situations where you really get back what you put in. The best sessions by far had the feel of an engaging graduate seminar class, with contributions coming from everyone and where there was freedom for even the topic to evolve with the discussion. In other words, everyone came to participate.

I will also point out that while its completely natural to spend the majority of your preparation time on your own presentation, my experience suggests that bringing thoughtful questions to other presentations is equally important. The the best thing about an unconference is that professionals are able to come together and discuss real issues face to face. So don’t loose sight of the fact that your input could be the difference between moving someone else’s project forward, perhaps in ways they never expected. Related to this, make sure to pay attention to the other participants’ blog/website postings and comments leading up to the conference (this, of course, being dependent on the unconference having a blog or website). Knowing what other people are thinking about before the event can jump start discussion in a powerful way.

What to propose?

Another common question for prospective unconference participants is what to propose.

The most important thing I learned about unconference proposals, as both a presenter and an audience member, is that interactivity is essential. No one wants to sit around and be read to, especially when its possible to give them a chance to react and share their own ideas.

Along with this, it cannot be stressed enough that big ideas should be welcome. Even if these ideas, as is often the case, are challenging to define, explain or put into practical terms. Remember that because these discussions can be free flowing, there is no need to arrive at the unconference with predetermined conclusions. Simply asking the interesting question is all that is required.

On the other hand, some great sessions were remarkably down to earth and practical. This was especially true when talking about technology, coding, implementation of new tools, etc. The point is, while “big ideas” are encouraged, practicality and pragmatism are also important components to many excellent proposals.

Enjoy yourself

The unconference model allows for relatively informal discussions to take place. Also, because everyone is technically a presenter, many of the hierarchies found in some more traditional conferences are eased. I would advise everyone attending an unconference to take advantage of this. Make connections with people from different levels of seniority or experience. I’ve found that the more people enjoy themselves, the better the conversations flow which, in turn, leads to better discussion and a more successful event. So have fun.

THATCamp Oral History will be held on October 13th 2012 in Cleveland, Ohio in conjunction with the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association. THATCamp Oral History is a collaborative effort of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University and the Ohio Humanities Council. To learn more, visit oha2012.thatcamp.org/about and/or follow us on Twitter: @thatcampoha.