| History
390 & History 530: Summer Workshop in Oral and Video History Prof. Gerald Zahavi This intensive two-day workshop explores the collection and use (and abuse) of recorded first-person oral and video/film interviews in the study of modern U. S. history. It aims, especially, to make students aware of both the "documentary" aspects of oral testimonies, as well as -- in oral historian Ronald Grele's words -- the "underlying structure of consciousness that both governs and informs oral history interviews." We’ll explore several representative historical works that heavily utilize oral history in the study of social/cultural groups and individuals. We'll probe the problems that necessarily arise when oral historians evoke and interpret the memories of those who are outside their own experiential ideological, class, sexual, cultural, or racial horizons. We'll examine the use of oral/video testimony in radio, television and theatrical productions. From in-class interview sessions to field projects, from technical instruction in the use of audio and video equipment to transcript and media editing, the course is designed to teach students critical and practical skills, and to demonstrate the potential of this important research methodology. A NOTE ON EQUIPMENT: Students should have access to a portable tape recorder (or preferably a minidisk or flashcard recorder) and a microphone. You SHOULD NOT use micro- or mini-recorders. You SHOULD NOT record in a highly compressed format (i.e. on cheap hand-held electronic recorders that produce highly compressed MP3 recordings). You SHOULD RARELY rely on microphones built into some recorders, but only on separate, stand-alone microphones (there are some exceptions that I will discuss in class). There are a variety of recorders now available for audio recording: analog, flashcard, and hard-drive. Some pro-level analog and digital recording equipment may be available for short-term loan to class members (but there are a limited number available since many of our loaner machines are currently being used in the field on two current projects: the Capital Voices ~ Capital Lives project and the Hudson400 Oral History Project). Ideally, students should consider purchasing a good quality portable recorder and a stand-alone microphone (you can get them through local vendors or through professional audio suppliers such as B&H Photo-Video-Pro Audio Corp [http://www.bhphotovideo.com], BSW [http://www.bswusa.com], Bradley Broadcast [http://www.bradleybroadcast.com], Sweetwater [http://www.sweetwater.com], and Full Compass [http://www.fullcompass.com]). E-Bay is a good source of used equipment, though there are many other used equipment and auction sites now on the Internet. I’ll have much more to say on all of this in class. Final Writing/Project Requirement: There is only one major writing/project assignment for the course; it is due by Thursday afternoon, June 18. You will conduct and fully process at least one interview -- as though you were preparing it for an archive. This includes:
Hand in the original recording, the release form, the interview log/history, the index, and a full transcription. The log, index, and transcription should be submitted electronically on a CD, or emailed as attachments to me. If you digitize your recording, please submit the digital copy on a CD or DVD. Here are some guidelines for selecting an interviewee/topic: 1) You may select anyone -- except a family member or close friend -- as the subject of your interview: a politician, a factory or service worker, a business executive, a member of the clergy, a teacher, a social or political activist, a soldier, and so on. 2) You may explore any theme you wish – from race relations to labor struggles, from corporate downsizing to culture wars, from warfare to peace movement building – BUT you must focus on historical events or experiences and not merely on contemporary life. 3) If you don't have a subject in mind, there are two major local oral history projects currently underway to which you might want to contribute: Capital Voices ~ Capital Lives: An Aural History of New York’s Capital Region and the The Hudson400 Oral History Project (part of the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the exploration of the Hudson-Champlain region – focusing on the oral history of Hudson River communities). I’ll give more details on these projects in class. SCHEDULE Day 1: May 26 (Tuesday)
Day 2: May 27 (Wednesday)
READINGS: We will cover the following readings in class. All of them are available for on-line reading and download. All are available on electronic reserve through the University Library (as well as on the Blackboard page for the class -- but this will not become available until two weeks before class, so USE THE ELECTRONIC RESERVE PAGE (electronic reserve). TO ACCESS THE READINGS FAR ENOUGH AHEAD OF CLASS TO ALLOW YOU TO GET THE READING ASSIGNMENTS DONE ON TIME). Please have all of the documents and Web sites read and reviewed by our first meeting, May 26th. The arrangement of the readings below approximates the order in which they will be discussed over the two days of classes. Note that some assignments are in on-line sources; please let me know if there are any broken links and I will correct them. 1) Selections from Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (pp. 17-24; 79-103; 156-176). (electronic reserve.) 2) Studs Terkel, Jan Vansina, Alice Kessler Harris, Dennis Tedlock, Saul Benison, Ronald J. Grele, "It's Not the Song, It's the Singing: Panel discussion on Oral History," in Ronald J. Grele, ed., Envelopes of Sound. (electronic reserve.) 3) Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 1-26 & notes. ("The Death of Luigi Trastulli"). (electronic reserve.) 4) Alice M. & Howard S. Hoffman, Archives of Memory: A Soldier Recalls World War II (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1990), xii-62. (electronic reserve.) 5) Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, “Conducting Interviews,” pp. 57-81. (electronic reserve.) 6) Charles T. Morrissey, "The Two Sentence Format as an Interviewing Technique in Oral History Fieldwork," Oral History Review 15 (Spring 1987), 43-53. (electronic reserve.) 7) Example of Oral History Tape Log and Index. (electronic reserve.) 8) Department of History, SUNY-Albany. "Interview Release Form." (electronic reserve.) 9) Montana Historical Society Oral History Office. Example of tape log and index. (electronic reserve.) 10) Example of completed release form: Roger Ray interview (5-19-2004). (electronic reserve.) 11) [ON LINE RESOURCES] Southern Oral History Program. http://sohp.org/howto/guide/index.html. Miscellaneous forms and examples of transcripts, life history forms, field notes, tape labels, tape logs and indexes, transcriber's guidelines, and more. Review the various documentation forms that the SOHP utilizes. 12) Linda Shopes, “Designing an Oral History Project” / “Conducting an Oral History Interview” / “Oral History: Selected Bibliography” / “How to Read an Interview” / “Web Resources for Oral History” and other short pieces. (electronic reserve.) 13) Willia K. Baum, Oral History for the Local Historical Society, 3rd Edition, revised (AASLH, 1987), pp. 35-48. (electronic reserve.) 14) Selection from James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (2004) “The View from the Bottom Rail.” (electronic reserve.) 15) ON LINE RESOURCES: Slave Narratives ~ selections to sample. (Skim these sites only, and sample some of the interviews; they contain thousands of pages.):
16) Mary Palevsky, Atomic Fragments: A Daughter’s Questions (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000. Selection, pp. 1-17; 41-68. (electronic reserve.) 17) Alison Owings, Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993). Selection (“Frau Anna Rigl”). (electronic reserve.) 18) Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart (1994) [selections]. (electronic reserve.) 19) Gerald Zahavi, "Negotiated Loyalty: Welfare Capitalism and the Shoeworkers of Endicott Johnson, 1920-1940," The Journal of American History 70 (Dec., 1983): 602-20. (electronic reserve.) 20) ____________, "Passionate Commitments: Race, Sex, and Communism at Schenectady General Electric, 1932-1954." The Journal of American History, 83 (Sept. 1996). (electronic reserve.) 21) _____________, “Who’s Going to Dance with Somebody Who Calls You a Mainstreeter”: Communism, Culture, and Community in Sheridan County, Montana, 1918-1934, Great Plains Quarterly 16 (Fall 1996): 251-86). (electronic reserve.) 22) Selection from John A. Neuenschwander, Oral History and the Law (revised edition) Albuquerque, NM: Oral History Association, 2002. (electronic reserve.) 23) Daphne Patai, "U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?" from Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, New York: Routledge, 1991. (electronic reserve.) 24) ON LINE RESOURCES:
25) Selections from Kenneth L. Kann, Comrades and Chicken Ranchers: The Story of a California Jewish Community, (Cornell University Press, 1993). (electronic reserve.) 26) Dennis Tedlock, "Learning to Listen: Oral history as Poetry," in Grele, ed., Envelopes of Sound, 107-125. (electronic reserve.) 27) (On-line Resource): http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub96/contents.html. Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Folk Heritage Collections in Crisis (also available in PDF format). Report of the conference on audio preservation, rights management, and intellectual access held at Library of Congress in December 2000. 2001. You do not need to read the entire document. Skim it. I will refer to specific sections in class and you can review these sections afterwards. 28) “What the Hell is a Radio Documentary” and other selections from the Nieman Reports (Fall 2001): (electronic reserve.) 29) Marty Pottenger, "CWT#3: Making City Water Tunnel #3," High Performance (Spring 1997), pp. 2-10. (electronic reserve.) 30) Della Pollock, "Telling the Told; Performing Like a Family," Oral History Review 18/2 (Fall 1990): 1-36. (electronic reserve.) 31) Donald A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, pp. 109-129 (“Videotaping Oral History”). (electronic reserve.) 32) Don Sipe, “The Future of Oral History and Moving Images,” in Perks and Thomson, Oral History Reader (1998). (electronic reserve.) 33) Jim Stinson, “The Art of the Video Interview,” (Videomaker, July 2000). (electronic reserve.) 34) Terri A. Schorzman, ed., A Practical Inroduction to Videohistory: The Smithsonian Institution and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Experiment (Krieger, 1993). Chapter 2. (electronic reserve.) 35) Video/Audio Scene outline for Brian D. Mauriello's documentary, Which Way EJ? (electronic reserve.) 36) (On-line) Review by Jesse Lemisch of Helen Garvey’s film, SDS: Rebels With a Cause. http://www.h-net.org/mmreviews/showrev.cgi?path=382 37) (On-line) Web site for Errol Morris’s film, Fog of War: http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar/ 38) (On line) Thomas Dublin and Melissa Doak, "Miner's Son, Miners' Photographer: The Life and Work of George Harvan," in The Journal for MultiMedia History 3 (2000). http://www.albany.edu/jmmh. 39) (On line) Charles Hardy III and Alessandro Portelli, "Can Almost See the Lights of Home ~ A Field Trip to Harlan County, Kentucky," in The Journal for MultiMedia History 2 (1999). http://www.albany.edu/jmmh.[select issue #2 from "Past Issues"] |