Week 10: Audio, Oral Histories, and Transcription (March 19/21)

Homework (due by Noon on March 19):

• Readings for Week 10:

  • “The Voice of the Past” and “What makes Oral History Different” in The Oral History Reader
  • Listen to some part of “I can almost see the lights of home” http://www.albany.edu/jmmh/vol2no1/lightssoundessay.html
  • Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Computational Methods for Listening to Gentrification, Alison Martin digital humanities quarterly 15.1, 2021

• See #dream-group-instructions for what to DM me on Slack from our Project “Speed Dating” from class
• Add a copyright notice and, if you wish, an open-access license (Creative Commons) to your website.

  • Locate the icon to add to your site
  • Instructions to add CC to your WordPress Site: Creative Commons – WordPress.com Support
  • For traditional copyright, you can use this Plugin: Copyright plugin for WordPress – Copyright content protection for WordPress website
  • You should do this for every website you create in this course.

• Blog Post #4 Using the readings/videos and the class exercises – Who owns the past? Which level of copyright/open access have you selected for your website? What copyrights and licenses have been assigned to the sources you’ve used so far in this class? (Go back and look.) What type of Creative Commons (or public domain) do you plan to select for your final project? Why? What potential limitations will you encounter for your final project?

  • Don’t forget to comment on your peers’ blog posts (at least two)

• Work on your Museum Assignment due on March 26

In Class (March 21):

• Doing Oral History

  • Oral history is a technique for generating and preserving original, historically interesting information – primary source material – from personal recollections through planned recorded interviews. We are going to evaluate oral histories based on best practices used in the Smithsonian Oral History Program at the Smithsonian Institution Archives.
  • Watch:

• Oral History Activity: Listening to History
• Oral History Investigation – Black Panthers
• Websites that offer guidelines and suggestions for conducting oral history interviews:

  • Oral History Workshop on the Web, developed by the Baylor University Institute for Oral History
  • Smithsonian Archive’s Doing Oral History Guide
  • Using Oral History, a lesson plan developed by the Library of Congress as part of the American Memory Collection, American Life Histories, 1936-40
  • Folklife and Fieldwork: A Layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques, published by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress

Class Prep for March 26:

• Work on your Museum Assignment due on March 26
• Read: Owens, Digital Sources & Digital Archives: The Evidentiary Basis of Digital History
• Skim: Library of Congress, “Personal Archiving,” part of the Digital Preservation
• Explore: Dublin Core, “Metadata Basics.”
• Skim: Working with Dublin Core, Omeka Classic User Manual
• Metadata in Omeka Before we can build an exhibit, we need items in our Omeka site. You will need to find and upload 5 primary sources (preferably image-based or audio-visual [a/v] based) that relate to whatever topic you plan to do for your final project.

  • Find 5 primary sources that relate to that topic AND load the citation into Zotero, as well as upload the images and/or audio-visual (a/v) sources into your WordPress media library