[SIGCIS-Members] Discipline-Specific Debates in Oral History?

[Laine Nooney]

I did mean what I said, but Al's version works too. And even though
everyone constantly says things like "oral history sound be taken with a
grain of salt" (which is not exactly a position I'd agree with), we've just
witnessed a pretty messy display of intellectual territorialism anchored
around the dubious notion that remembered experiences are the primary
ground from which historical claims should be made. I'm looking for
published resources in this space, beyond the anecdotal, to help ground my
own claims.

Andre, the points you bring up are potent and relevant to this
conversation. If you have other directions for exploration, I'd love to
know more.

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 5:29 PM Andre Brock <brocka at umich.edu> wrote:

> No, i believe she meant 'unmediated vessels of their own experience'.
> Having been a researcher of technology, society, and culture for nearly 15
> years now, i find that white people are rarely reflective about their
> technological selves.  Instead, they often interpellate beliefs about
> technoculture to situate their remembered selves as technical subjects,
> innocent of cultural values.   When histories of marginalized figures in
> those communities become available, then cultural and social dimensions of
> technoculture become visible, and if lucky, popular.  see also, "Hidden
> Figures".
>
> A.
>
> Andre Brock
> Assistant Professor, Communication Studies
> University of Michigan
>
>
> On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 5:16 PM Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 5/24/17 1:41 PM, Laine Nooney wrote:
>>
>> > For some reason, in the history of computing and games particularly,
>> there can be a lingering attachment to interpreting
>> > oral history sources as unmediated vessels of their own experience,
>> even though this has been roundly debunked by oral
>> > history scholarship going back to the mid-1970s.
>> What do you mean by "unmediated vessels of their own experience" ?
>>
>> Did you mean "infallible records of their own experience" ?
>>
>> Having been on the staff of CHM for over ten years now and having done my
>> share of oral histories with people
>> whom I am very familiar with, remembrances are not exact, nor would
>> anyone expect them to be, especially with
>> long temporal distances from the events being discussed. Any interview
>> should be taken with a grain of salt and
>> compared to historical documents and contemporary and historical
>> interviews of others.
>>
>> Oral histories can also be biased by the research interests and knowledge
>> of the interviewer through his line of
>> questioning.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Laine Nooney
www.lainenooney.com

DM <http://dm.lmc.gatech.edu/> @ LMC <http://lmc.gatech.edu/> @ GT
<http://www.gatech.edu/>
Assistant Professor
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