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Why Oral History?

Nyhan, Julianne; Flinn, Andrew; (2016) Why Oral History? In: Computation and the Humanities. (pp. 21-36). Springer: Cham, Switzerland. Green open access

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Abstract

This chapter begins with an overview of the histories of oral history and its use within different branches of academic and public history. Focussing next on the study of communities, it briefly explores the contested, fuzzy and fluid meaning of the term ‘community’ before examining the application of oral history to community histories, including academic and professional communities. It discusses some of the ethical challenges at stake in this type of historical research, including the multifaceted relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee, and the choice of which ‘significant’ lives are privileged to tell the story of the community (and therefore which significant lives and perspectives might be missing). Before outlining some of the issues surfaced by using oral history to document foundational stories of DH as a discipline, this chapter looks briefly at the use of oral history in some other analogous professional and academic settings. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on the suitability of oral history in telling these community stories by asking who owns these histories and how that ownership is manifested.

Type: Book chapter
Title: Why Oral History?
ISBN-13: 978-3-319-20169-6
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_2
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2_2
Language: English
Additional information: Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/) which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material.
Keywords: Arts & Humanities, Science & Technology, Technology, Humanities, Multidisciplinary, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Arts & Humanities - Other Topics, Computer Science
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10203851
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