AMICAL is offering an online Digital Oral History Institute this summer (on June 21, 28, and July 5).
The Institute will consist of three interconnected workshops that together will offer introductory, but substantial, training in the methodology of oral history. It will be facilitated by Brooke Bryan, whose bio you can read below.
The Institute is free to interested faculty and staff from all AMICAL members institutions. All costs will be covered by AMICAL.
Overview of the Institute
During the Institute, participants will learn tools and tactics for planning a digital oral history project, implementing best practices, conducting interviews, working with archives, and building collaborative public-facing projects using digital tools.
Each of the three workshops will be 2.5 hours long and take place online between 13:00 and 15:30 Paris time on the dates indicated below.
- 21 June 2022 – Digital Oral History as Method: Ethics & Best Practices for Community-Based Learning. This session is a fundamental introduction to doing oral history in higher education, including an overview of ethics, best practices and IRB implications— emphasizing how the increased access afforded by curated, public-facing digital projects complicates informed consent. We will consider release forms, project planning basics, and community partnerships.
- 28 June 2022 – The Art of the Interview: Unstructured Encounters & the Abbreviated Life Story. This session takes a deep dive into one particular model of interviewing and how to plan for unstructured, co-constituted dialog. We’ll consider a tactical strategy for managing the timespace of the interview.
- 5 July 2022 – Stewarding Story & Scholarship: Working Deeply in Narrative Material. We’ll establish baseline best practices of file management and workflows, consider interpretive strategies and time coded media, and discuss archival partnerships. We’ll explore how undergraduate fieldwork projects using digital tools engage the soft skills of the liberal arts and can support your scholarly agenda through specific pedagogical frameworks.
After each workshop, recordings will also be made available to registrants, along with other supplementary material.
Because the workshops build on each other to teach this methodology, if you aren’t able to attend a workshop, make sure to view its recording before attending the next one. (Attending all three workshops is also a requirement for further project support, as described below.)
We encourage participants who have little or no familiarity with oral history, to view the recording of Brooke Bryan’s webinar, “The Interview Project: Oral history and digital scholarship as method for cross-role collaboration and community engagement,” before attending the Institute.
Project support after the Institute
Following the Institute, AMICAL members will be able to apply to join our Digital Oral History cohort program for project support. This program will include individual consultations with Brooke Bryan, as well further trainings that will focus on how to build curated, public facing projects with free or open source tools.
To be eligible for the Digital Oral History cohort program, all members of a project team must have attended all three Institute workshops. If you have already applied to the Digital Oral History cohort program, you won’t need to do so again, but you do need to attend the Institute workshops to be eligible for support.
We may limit the number of projects accepted into the Digital Oral History cohort program according to the funding we have available.
About the Institute’s facilitator
Brooke Blackmon Bryan received the post-secondary teaching award from the Oral History Association for her work stewarding undergraduate fieldwork projects using oral history and tools from the digital humanities. Trained in philosophical aesthetics, she has been involved in phenomenological oral history for more than 10 years. Brooke’s work emphasizes the importance of the interview encounter and how the prevalence of public-facing digital projects complicates informed consent, or what we might call the guiding logic of oral history practice. Brooke is Assistant Professor of Writing, Aesthetics, and Digital Studies at Antioch College, and an AMICAL digital consultant for oral history projects through the 2022-23 academic year.