conducting your own oral history project
Are there stories that you think should be told? Tell them!
Here's how you can do it, based on my experience:
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Begin by checking out other projects.
The internet is full of examples of other oral history and family history projects. Look to others' works for inspiration for your own project. Here are a couple projects I looked at when I began mine.
Think about what you want your project to look like.
The Minor in Writing capstone course requires every student to make a website that hosts their project, so I knew I would be creating a website. I liked the idea of having short audio clips in chronological order, interspersed with photographs. I kept this in mind as I organized interview questions and collected photographs and other materials. I decided to use Wix, a free platform with plenty of easy-to-use templates, to create this website.
Prepare for your interviews.
What do you want to capture with your project? Who will you need to interview to do this?
Create a list of interview questions and provide it to your interviewees in advance to get the best answers.
There are many resources with examples of questions for family history projects that I looked at. Here are the two websites I sourced most of my questions from:
Once you know the questions you want to ask, create an outline of your interview questions based on your vision for the final project. I imagined short clips covering different stages of life and outlined my questions based on this idea, similar to the way questions are outlined in UCLA Library's "Family History Sample Outline and Questions."
Devise a plan for interviewing.
How long do you think your interviews will take? Will you conduct your interviews in one day or over several days? Where will you be conducting these interviews, and what kind of equipment will you use?
Pick a quiet place without echoes or background noise. Noises produced by refrigerators, pets, heating and cooling systems, and traffic will likely be picked up by your equipment and can detract from the quality of your audio recordings.
For recording, I used a free app on my iPhone called RØDE Reporter. The Voice Memos app on iPhone also works well. Before starting the interview, test your equipment to make sure the audio sounds good and is at an appropriate volume.
Some resources for interviewing:
Conduct interviews and collect supplementary materials for your project.
Nana and I decided that instead of me asking questions and her answering them, she would answer a series of related questions from my printed list in one long answer. This helped keep the segments of audio fluid and coherent. I also didn't have to edit the audio as heavily because my voice was excluded from the outset.
In addition to interviewing, Nana and I sifted through thousands of photographs and looked at old documents including journals, letters, and even diplomas. Collecting these materials helped add depth and visual interest to my project, and was also helpful in sparking ideas for further interviews.
Edit your interviews and create your project!
I used GarageBand for editing. I found many useful tutorials for editing audio with GarageBand on YouTube, which made the process pretty easy and straightforward.
I also transcribed my interviews using an online service called Scribie.
