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OHA 2013 and social media

As we move toward the annual meeting in Oklahoma City, it’s incumbent that we fruitfully employ social media to maximize the impact of the meeting, and by extension OHA itself.  Accordingly we are encouraging OHA members, H-Oralhist subscribers, and conference attendees to do the following:
1) Like us on Facebook.  Only a minority of the OHA membership follows us on Facebook, thus precluding an avenue of ongoing communication about OHA and the field more generally.  Share comments, photographs and even sound and video from the meeting on the OHA Facebook page.
2) Follow us on Twitter at @OHAnetwork.  Use twitter to share commentary about the annual meeting (#OHA2013) as well as developments within OHA and the field.
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Special book signing at Oklahoma University Press booth in meeting exhibit hall

In addition to the regularly scheduled book signing, scheduled for Friday, October 11 from 3:15-3:45 in the meeting exhibit hall, the Oklahoma University Press will be sponsoring a special signing. Stephen Fagin, author of Assassination and Commemoration: JFK, Dallas, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, will be signing copies of his book at the Oklahoma University Press booth, Thursday, October 10 from 12:00-1:00.

Assassination and Commemoration: JFK, Dallas, and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza by Stephan Fagin recounts the slow and painful process by which the city of Dallas, Texas, and a nation came to terms with its collective memory of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and its aftermath. Today, The Sixth Floor Museum helps visitors to interpret the depository and Dealey Plaza as sacred ground and a monument to an unforgettable American tragedy. Fagin’s book both carefully studies a community’s confrontation with tragedy and explores the ways we preserve the past.
http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/1774/assassination%20and%20commemoration

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Southern Foodways Alliance Celebrates Oral History

The Southern Foodways Alliance will be represented in one of the OHA 2013 Annual Meeting plenary sessions. Below is their announcement celebrating the oral history archives at the SFA.

 

Welcome to the SFA’s first-ever Oral History Week.

Did you know:

We’ve had an online oral history archive since the inception of our oral history initiative in 2003. We committed ourselves to sharing our work with the widest audience possible from the get-go, and we’ve tried to update our methods as new media (outlets, as well as tools) continues to become available.

To date, 564 SFA oral history interviews are available online. For free. To the public. (In case the Internet breaks, we’ve also secured a place for them in the University of Mississippi library.) Our oral histories are accessed by everyone from travelers to scholars to armchair food enthusiasts.

For every subject, you’ll find:

  • A portrait
  • A short bio of the individual and his/or her place of work
  • A quote
  • Location and contact information, if the individual runs a public space such as a restaurant
  • A full PDF transcript of the interview
  • A 3-5 minute audio slideshow
  • An album of still photographs
  • A stand-alone audio clip

Why all this media? We want you give you the ability to hear the individual’s voice, read her story, and see her at work.

You’ll notice that when we updated our website this summer, we redesigned our online oral history archive. Our goal is twofold: we want to emphasize new media and an interactive user experience while maintaining best practices for the field of oral history. We will always, always remain committed to the long-form oral history interview. Different forms of media are so inexpensive and accessible now. Stories are shorter, and everyone is telling them—the SFA included. But we continue to invest in formal interviews and creating primary source material that scholars can use for generations to come.

With the help of our graduate student assistants, we’re also working to update older projects with new media.

You’ll notice that our website no longer features interactive maps for each of the the oral history trails. We invite hungry travelers to make use of our iPhone app, “SFA Stories.” (For those those wishing to embark on the Tamale Trail, we do offer a new interactive map.)

We’ve tried to make it easy for you to find the stories that interest you most:

  • The newest oral history projects appear first; you can also sort by state.
  • Our Culinary Trails (Tamales, Barbecue, Gumbo, and Boudin) are featured separately at the bottom of the oral history index.
  • If you know what you’re looking for, make use of the “advanced search” option in the search box at the top right corner of the site. There, you can dig for specific people, places, and foods.

How have scholars and writers made use of our archive? Last week, Katie Rawson presented an analysis of gender in the oyster industry in Apalachicola, Florida, using our “Florida’s Forgotten Coast” oral history project. Dale and John Shelton Reed made use of our North Carolina barbecue oral histories in their 2008 book, Holy Smoke. And excerpts from five oral histories will appear in Cornbread Nation 7, forthcoming from UGA Press in spring 2014.

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Centre for Public History Bangalore sponsors Winter School on Orality, Memory and Social Change

The first-ever Winter School on Orality, Memory and Social Change in India hopes to make good some of that loss. To be held from November 6 to 15 at Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, the course will ‘focus on the role played by oral history in documenting social change’. The school is partnered by Instituto Italiano di Cultura, New Delhi, Trinity College, Dublin and Center for Contemporary Studies at Indian Institute of Science.

The Winter School will address a few key questions in the field of oral history, especially its understanding, which according to Chowdhury, is a method by which spoken accounts that are offered by interviewees in response to questioning are recorded, archived and analysed. “Oral histories can be reflective, deeply involved, always subjective but valuable and irreplaceable sources. Our course will focus on orality, memory and social change and will look at understandings of social change through voices that are often not included in official histories,” she says.

Admissions to the winter school are still open. Those interested must write soon to cph@srishti.ac.in. For course details, go to http://cphwinterschool.wordpress.com.

Read more at New Indian Express.

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Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Oral History Project

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. launched its Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Oral History Project on the NTI website Sept. 19.

The project features interviews with several people who were involved in various aspects of the NLCA negotiations over several decades, as well as a photographic history of the last several years.

“This project presents very valuable historical material and provides detailed firsthand information about a turning point in Canadian history. This tells the story of how Nunavut came to be, and I am honoured to launch this today,” said NTI president Cathy Towtongie in an NTI news release.

The NLCA oral history project is available in Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun and English.

Read more on the NTI website or Nunatsiaq Online.

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Blog: The International Oral History Conference – Power and Democracy: the many voices of Oral History

This month we will be highlighting Power and Democracy:  the many voices of Oral History.  The XVIII International Oral History Conference to be held 9-12 July, 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.   Information about the conference can be found at http://2014iohacongress.wordpress.com/.  Please note that the deadline for the call for proposals has been extended to September 15, 2013.  For more information about submitting a proposal, see http://2014iohacongress.wordpress.com/proposals/.  Individual papers, thematic panels, workshop proposals and performance segments are being sought.

Details about the conference focus are as follows:
The force of democracy as well as the resistance it has met have prompted oral history project around the world.  Interviews with advocates of change have supplemented and supplanted archives of discredited regimes.  Oral histories have document social and political upheavals, reform movement and reactions. Oral history have revealed the effects of power relationships that exist between citizens and their governments, workers and employers, students and teachers, and the layers within institutions, communities and families.  As a democratic tool, oral history records and preserves the memories, perceptions, and voices of individuals and groups at all levels and in all endeavors, but that raises questions about what to do with these interviews and how to share them with the people and communities they reflect. “Power and democracy” will be the theme of the IOHA’s meeting in Barcelona, with the sub-themes:
•    Archives, Oral Sources and Remembrance
•    Power in Human Relations
•    Democracy as a Political Tool
•    Oral Sources and Cultural Heritage
•    New Ways to Share Our Dialogue with the Public

Rob Perks at the British Library has recently proposed a theme panel ‘making oral history interviews available on the Web’.  If interested in participating in this panel, please email Rob Perks at Rob.Perks@bl.uk outlining what you can contribute to the overall subject.  He would particularly like to explore Ron Grele’s recent provocative assertion that “the future does not look bright.  The only interviews that will be placed online will be very, very ‘safe’ or innocuous.  We will soon be back to vanity interviews of movers and shakers.” The British Library’s website is http://www.bl.uk/.

Hope to see you in Barcelona.

Many thanks
Your International Committee Web Liaison,
Leslie McCartney

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Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History conducts project on Kentucky Bourbon Barons

The “Kentucky Bourbon Tales,” a collaborative effort by the Kentucky Distillers’ Association and the University of Kentucky’s Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, sits down Kentucky’s bourbon barons to tell the stories about themselves, their age-old craft and their products that are in global demand.

The project’s first interviews were done late last month with the father-and-son team of Parker and Craig Beam. They are master distillers at Heaven Hill Distilleries Inc., the Bardstown-based maker of Evan Williams bourbon — the world’s No. 2-selling bourbon. The Beam family traces its whiskey-making roots in Kentucky to 1795, when Jacob Beam set up his first still.

Other bourbon makers to be featured include Brown-Forman Corp., Diageo North America, Four Roses, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark and Wild Turkey.

The bourbon interviews will eventually be accessible athttp://www.kentuckyoralhistory.org

Read more from The Republic.

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2013 Emerging Crises Research Fund Recipient Announced!

The Oral History Association is delighted to announce that the 2013 Emerging Crisis Oral History Research Fund goes to Carrie and Michael Kline of Talking Across the Lines for their proposed project “The Oil and Gas Rush in the Marcellus Shale Fields of West Virginia: An Emerging Crisis.”

As in other parts of the United States, northcentral West Virginia is experiencing an ecological and public health crisis and a deep community conflict ensuing from deep and horizontal drilling, known as “fracking,” to extract natural gas. As the Klines write, “The Appalachian region is in an uproar of pain and confusion” around fracking. Citizen opinion about the practice runs along a wide spectrum, and community relations run the risk of being ruptured.

With support from the OHA Emerging Crises Research Fund, Talking Across the Lines will record lengthy testimonials from people on all sides of the issue in far greater depth than the average journalist or news crew will cover, linking larger reflections about family, home and community to fracking, and perhaps helping to “discover common ground among apparently polarized points of view.” As the Klines write, “Without this proposed listening project, these complexities would otherwise be lost or unavailable.” They argue that their project “can play an important role in balancing the need for energy independence with protection of health, happiness and human rights among the region’s inhabitants. Such is the power of spoken narratives.”

 

Carrie and Michael Kline

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HOTEL UPDATE OHA 2013 Annual Meeting

All of the rooms at the Skirvin, the conference hotel, have now been reserved.

The OHA has booked additional rooms at the Hampton Inn and Suites, 5-6 blocks from the Skirvin, in the Bricktown district. Conference rates are $149 for a room with a single king-sized bed, and $154 for a room with double queen-sized beds. To book a room, call 405-232-3600 and notify the hotel that you are with the OHA. In addition, we will also be getting a personalized group website from the hotel in the near future through which people can also make a reservation.

All reservations must be received by the hotel by September 18, 2013.

Information about other hotels near the Skirvin and housing updates can be located on the OHA website: http://www.oralhistory.org/housing/

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