[SIGCIS-Members] Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing

[Lean, Tom]

"I have found that interviews done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened. Many people “remember” what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so."

That's a very good point, but it opens up a much larger sets of issues. In my experience, people don't recount what happened, but recreate a version of events that make sense to them based on what they think they did, what sort of things the questioner is interested in, what they can remember, what others have said, what the circumstances of the retelling are... etc, etc - Alessandro Portelli and other oral historians explain this far better than I, but memories are impressions of the past never exact accounts of what happened and that's how we need to read and use them, with the understanding gained from other sources wherever possible. Of course, the team aspect of science and technology projects, where individuals only get to see small parts of much bigger and more complex projects and often don't appreciate how their work intermeshes with others in detail are probably far more complicated than issues encountered by oral historians in other fields. What individuals think they did and what their actual contributions are can be quite complicated as few people get to see the whole thing!

Cheers,

Tom






Dr Thomas Lean
--
An Oral History of the Electricity Supply Industry / An Oral History of British Science
National Life Stories
The British Library
http://www.bl.uk/voices-of-science
________________________________________
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [members-bounces at sigcis.org] on behalf of Mike Willegal [mike at willegal.net]
Sent: 08 October 2014 12:08
To: members at sigcis.org
Subject: [SIGCIS-Members]  Issason, Acknowledgements, and Crowdsourcing

Though we are lucky enough to be able to talk to many people that experienced the events, first hand, I have found that interviews done 30, 40 or 50 years after the fact is fraught with the difficulty of people remembering exactly what happened.  Many people “remember” what has been most frequently reported over the past decade or so.  Researchers in Civil War history have found the same thing and are more and more relying upon contemporary evidence such as journals, newspapers and letters.

regards,
Mike Willegal
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