This week's readings pertain to oral history. Oral history is the oldest form of history, dating back to the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons through epic poems and songs. Oral history is important in that it has to do with primary sources in the form of interviewees. One cannot get closer to history than with a conversation with someone who took part in it.
The first reading was from the website ''History Controversy in the News'' which comes, ultimately, from Wikipedia. The site itself was informative, yet the blog was superfluous since the information came from Wikipedia. It gave examples of oral history, such as oral history in Britain, mentioning the transition from folklore studies to proper oral history. It offers useful tidbits of information, such as the correct way to ask questions. The example given is for interviewers to ask open-ended questions so that the interviewees will not answer the way the interviewer wishes them to answer. This is useful in that you obtain truthful information from the informant. The site is informative and gives the correct starting point for a good interview.
The second reading was from the website ''History Matters'' and from the article, ''Oral History Online.'' This site is basically a list of oral history websites, some of which I have explored. Rutgers Oral History of the Second World War is a fairly decent site which is similar to the Texas Tech Archive for the Vietnam War in that it has letters and transcripts from previous interviews. Archives such as this are useful in that they contain a decent cache of information but some, like the Rutgers Archive, are not very user-friendly and are not interactive. For oral history in the secondary form to be useful and beneficial, it needs to be able to be used properly by anyone wishing to utilise the data contained within.
The third reading was a document about the changing face of oral history through time entitled ''Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History'' by Alistair Thomson. The document explains the four changes in oral history and its processes, mainly echoing the first reading and its information. It details some examples, such as biographical methods and changes in objectivity of the oral history processes. It also tells of the internationalisation of Oral history, with mentioning of the oral history society in Britain. Nostalgia, being seen as a distorting factor in oral history, is seen in a negative light in this essay. This is true in that nostalgia does taint memories and makes things seem more golden then they actually were.
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