Oral History in the Video Age

Peter B. Kaufman

Oral History Review, Volume 40, Number 1, Winter/Spring 2013, pp. 1-7
(Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/507838

Access provided at 9 Apr 2019 21:53 GMT from New York University
Oral History in the Video Age
Peter B. Kaufman

Abstract: This article examines the role of oral history in a cultural and tech-
nical context increasingly dominated by digital video. The author reflects on
new opportunities for video oral history, especially regarding access, audience
engagement, and innovative partnerships. These opportunities call for new
forms of engagement with the academy, with partners beyond the academy,
and with the vast and teeming crowd that is the modern digital public.

Keywords: digital video, open-source software, social media

Picture an airplane flight across an ocean at night: as the sky darkens, dinner
is served, and then the most noticeable thing about the plane is that almost
everyone is sitting lit by the video screens in front of them. In many ways we are
the passengers on this plane, relying no longer on speech or the printed page
but on the screen and its moving images for much of the information we are
receiving about our world.
This essay discusses the challenges confronting oral history in what is now,
in effect, the video age, an age when the vast majority of digital communica-
tions feature the moving image. The essay recommends that we amp up to meet
the video world head on and that, in the process, we learn from the experiences
of video makers and funders, especially those active in public media. These les-
sons would urge us to explore new forms of engagement with the academy, with
partners beyond the academy, and with the vast and teeming crowd that is the
modern digital public.

In Video Veritas
The number crunchers tell us that video will account for the vast majority (86
percent) of global consumer Internet traffic by the year 2016, and that by
2016 the amount of video crisscrossing the worldwide web just in an average
month would take one person six million years to watch (and, really, who has

doi:10.1093/ohr/oht033. Advance Access publication 22 March 2013

The Oral History Review 2013, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 1–7
© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.
This article is based on a case study included in Oral History in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.
msu.edu/); it has been expanded and updated for this issue and is used with permission.
2 KAUFMAN

that much time?).1 The larger point (if that’s conceivable) is that most people
today (and even more by 2016) access (and will be accessing) digital informa-
tion through a device that features a screen: a user interface, in other words,
that is built for video, a screen that is in the hands of everyone. Quite a remark-
able development, if you think about it, just 100 or 150 years after the advent
of cinema.
Historians who have wrestled with Carl Becker’s address from the 1930s—
one in which he reminded the profession of its “ancient and honorable company
of wise men of the tribe, of bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers
and priests,” where every man, as he put it, has been and will always be “his
own historian”—now must contend with constituents who not only will access
history through a screen but who have the facility and ability to record material
for posterity through their phones, laptops, desktops, and cameras. One might
(indeed, one should) contend that this is good news. The scrutiny to which the
historical profession will be put extends to multiple dimensions of sight and
sound. The literate reader of Becker’s time has become a fluent auditor and a
capable producer as well, a bard and priest of his own. Everyone now is not only
his own historian (or “something more than his own historian,” as Becker put
it), but his own oral historian, too, equipped with the technology to record his
interviews almost at all times.2
If teachers and students are appreciating the work of oral historians through
a screen and are capable of making what used to be called rich media as well,
then the field should endeavor to produce oral history with the full complement
of means at its disposal, including video cameras, whenever and wherever that is
cost- and resource-effective. Oral history, in a word, should become, quite natu-
rally, video history. True, much as musicians might not want to produce video to
accompany their music, so oral historians similarly might not feel compelled to
record moving images as they record sound. But for relevance alone, the modern
oral historian might at least consider deploying video technology, not simply to
compete for attention in the screen and video age but also to record as many
dimensions of the human/interviewee experience as possible for posterity. As
Becker said, “Berate him as we will for not reading our books, Mr. Everyman is
stronger than we are, and sooner or later we must adapt our knowledge to his

1 For richer statistics, see “Cisco Visual Networking Index: The Zettabyte Era,” Cisco, May 30, 2012, http://

www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_
WP.html; “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2011–2016,” Cisco, May 30, 2012,
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/ns537/ns705/ns827/white_paper_
c11-481360_ns827_Networking_Solutions_White_Paper.html; and Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman,
“Film and Sound in Higher and Further Education: A Progress Report with Ten Strategic Recommendations,”
JISC Film and Sound Think Tank, 2011, PDF, http://filmandsoundthinktank.jisc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/
JISC_FSTT_Report_v1-final.pdf.
2 Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” American Historical Review 37, no. 2 (January 1932), http://

www.historians.org/info/aha_history/clbecker.htm.
 Oral History in the Video Age 3

necessities. Otherwise he will leave us to our own devices, leave us it may be to

cultivate a species of dry professional arrogance growing out of the thin soil of
antiquarian research. Such research, valuable not in itself but for some ulterior
purpose, will be of little import except in so far as it is transmuted into common
knowledge.”3

Deeper Engagement
Today, the creation of common knowledge goes far beyond a passive and ever-
expanding access to knowledge, invaluable as such access may be. As a Mellon
Foundation-funded report for the American Council of Learned Societies pre-
dicted in 2006, the growing number of digital natives in and out of academia
who use “aggregations of text, image, video, sound, and metadata” also want
“tools that support and enable discovery, visualization, and analysis of patterns;
tools that facilitate collaboration; an infrastructure for authorship that supports
remixing, recontextualization, and commentary—in sum, tools that turn access
into insight and interpretation.”4
The tools for oral history to contribute its share of discovery, visualization,
and analysis are growing. While apps for mobile devices are still in their infancy
(although they are growing in number: the Southern Foodways Alliance at the
University of Mississippi has a good one, as does the Center for Public History
+ Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University), communities of educators,
producers, and funders are coming together to develop software and methods
of working that are of primary value in contributing new means of insight and
interpretation to the field.5
Popcorn, a JavaScript application being developed by the Mozilla
Foundation and others, is facilitating annotation and citation of sound and
moving-image assets to match the affordances of the scholarly footnote in text
and is enriching illustrations to the point of permitting users to navigate through
time and place—and to connect not only to scholarly assets on the web but to
real-time journalistic assets and live social media as well.6 Oral history has begun

3 Ibid. See also Sam Gregory, “Cameras Everywhere: Ubiquitous Video Documentation of Human Rights,

New Forms of Video Advocacy, and Considerations of Safety, Security, Dignity and Consent,” Journal of
Human Rights Practice 4, no. 3 (May 2010) doi: 10.1093/jhuman/huq002.
4 Marlo Welshons, ed., Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Society

Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, (New York: American Council of
Learned Societies, 2006), http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/ourculturalcommonwealth.pdf.
5 See Katy Petty, “Southern Foodways Alliance Shares Food Stories from the South on Broadcastr,” PRWeb,

April 4, 2011, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/04/prweb5219584.htm.

6 See Ben Moskowitz, “Frontline/PRX Hack Day: Prototyping ‘A Perfect Terrorist,’” Ben Moskowitz (blog),

April 13, 2012, http://www.benmoskowitz.com/?p=568; Mozilla Popcorn Maker, Mozilla Webmaker,

http://mozillapopcorn.org/ (accessed January 9, 2013); and “Healing Histories,” W.K. Kellogg Foundation,
Weber Shandwick and Legwork Studio, http://www.healinghistories.org (accessed January 9, 2013).
4 KAUFMAN

to explore this technology, but much more might be done.7 User interfaces for
oral history collections online that might display maps, essays, photos, and even
links to other oral history collections, would connect users to a variety of rel-
evant assets and make oral history more visually stimulating.
Another open-source technology, Mediathread, developed by Columbia
University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, is facilitating research
and scholarship by making the web itself (with assets like YouTube, ARTstor,
the WGBH Archive, and the HathiTrust) into one giant textbook. Imposing an
“analysis platform” over text, image, sound, and moving-picture assets, this
extraordinary tool permits multimedia annotation on web assets (which beats
underlining Beowulf, as I did in 1978) and also facilitates collaboration and
publication within the .edu domain or in more public environments.8 At the
University of Kentucky, OHMS (the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) is
being developed with similar ambitions: to link curated oral histories to the web
and the world in ways that enable their findability and analysis. Oral history
curators ought to strive to have their assets included in new experiments with
MediaThread, OHMS, and other such tools in development.9
Indeed, as we digitize our collective media, the hundreds of thousands
of full-length feature films, the millions of television shows, the tens of mil-
lions of recorded songs, the tens of millions of books, and the billions of web
pages together fuel what is a growing enormous electronic database/textbook.
Futurologist and Wired magazine co-founder Kevin Kelly calls it an electronic
mind. And because the main inputs this collective intelligence possesses today
are what Kelly calls its eyes and ears (billions of phones, microphones, and cam-
eras recording our sounds and visions), oral historians are in a critical place to
render our planet more sentient as we go.10

7In 2012, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a grant to a New School University
faculty member (HD-51513, Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-
linear Oral History Narratives): “This project builds on advances in HTML 5 to allow non-linear, hypertex-
tual connections within audio and video archives of humanities materials, with the Oral History of Robotics
archive serving as a test case.” Brett Bobley, “Announcing 22 New Start-Up Grant Awards (March 2012),”
National Endowment for the Humanities, March 20, 2012, http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/grant-news/
announcing-22-new-start-grant-awards-march-2012.
8 “MediaThread: Introduction,” Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL), Columbia

University, December 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KjzRG8zYYo. This project grew out of an

IMLS-funded grant to Columbia to build bridges between public media assets at WGBH in Boston and teach-
ing practices in Morningside Heights.
9 MediaThread, CNMTL, Columbia University, September 2010, http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/digital-

bridges/projects/mediathread.html; Doug Boyd, “OHMS,” Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of
Kentucky Libraries, http://libraries.uky.edu/libpage.php?lweb_id=11&llib_id=13&ltab_id=1370 (accessed
January 10, 2013); see also Will Thomas, “Tool Reviews,” Digital History Project, University of Nebraska–
Lincoln, http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/t-reviews.php (accessed January 10, 2013).
10 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2010). Technologists especially, but

many of us one way or the other, are aware that we are connecting to one another in new ways through our
screens, speakers, wires, and spectra. This is the point of the highest-grossing film of all time, Avatar. Set in the
future, the Na’avi people plug into and connect with the sounds of the past to heal and enlighten themselves.
 Oral History in the Video Age 5

Apart from new tools, there are modern platforms and homes to social
media. Owners of online platforms (Google and YouTube; Yahoo and Flickr;
Apple and iTunes; and the investors behind Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn,
among others) encourage us to post our assets and engage with these plat-
forms, but few hold as much promise as Wikipedia does—owned, as it is, by no
one, where everyone can be an editor—to facilitate a more open, democratic,
and educational discourse. Wikipedia has opened its doors to sound and the
moving image, with open-source video players and codecs developed to the
point that sound and moving footage can now be integrated into Wikipedia arti-
cles. For example, Wikipedia articles on Isaac Newton’s laws of motion are being
illustrated with video cleared by MIT and its physics professor Walter Lewin,
edited as short media illustrations. This, too, is the next frontier for oral history.
Imagine not just Wikipedia’s main article on oral history (sorely in need of updat-
ing) carrying sound clips but also articles about all kinds of topics (segregation,
farming, coal mining) featuring excerpts of authoritative oral testimonies (with
links back to their source).11

New Partnerships
The thought of connecting oral history’s treasury of assets, cataloged as they
have been for the Oral History in the Digital Age Project (http://ohda.matrix.
msu.edu/) and elsewhere, with the creative forces behind Wikipedia leads one
to ponder the potential of the field if its collections were marketed more effec-
tively and offered up to other professions, even within the discipline of his-
tory. What Becker called “the thin soil of antiquarian research” alone could be
a teeming and colorful garden, if its keepers recognized how many essays in
the online journals of the field could be pollinated by sound clips from librar-
ies like University of Kentucky’s or UNC-Chapel Hill’s. The Journal of American
History and the American Historical Review should feature articles with audio
from related oral history collections, not as special “digital projects” but as a
matter of course. Anyone aware of the vivid voices and sounds of the American
labor movement should wonder why oral history collections from Wayne State
University, as well as other repositories, don’t regularly illustrate Labor, the jour-
nal of working-class history published by Duke University Press.
More broadly (and keeping with Becker), those seeking to transmute into
common knowledge (another of Becker’s phrases) the work of oral history over
the decades would benefit from forging partnerships more systematically with

11 Peter B. Kaufman, “Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web: A Guide to Best Practices for Cultural and

Educational Institutions,” October 2010, PDF, http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf. This guide was

dedicated to the soothsayer-historian Roy Rosenzweig. See also Peter B. Kaufman, “Video, Education, and
Open Content,” First Monday 12, No. 4 (April 2007), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.
php/fm/article/view/1767/1647.
6 KAUFMAN

cousins of the discipline: journalists, say, or public media producers whose reach
into academic collections is not yet as deep as it might be. Newspapers, national
and local, regularly publish photo galleries online on holidays such as July 4th,
but the web leapfrogged this potential years ago. Offering readers galleries of
spoken-word interviews about the holiday would make enormous sense. While
public radio has been creative about deploying historical sounds in much of its
programming, the websites and even the programs of public television have
underwhelmed; that’s a problem that’s easy to fix. Perhaps what oral history
needs is an agent or broker or representative, linking its assets, which are free
for the most part, to the rest of the professional and authoritative web.

Conclusion
As young people learn about the world and society on a rectangular screen, the
values they attribute to any one medium are flat. Images, moving images, text
and sound all become equivalent to one another, and soon text may lose the
privileged status it has held over the past six hundred years. The differences in
media are evaporating, such that pictures of austere judges in front of rows of
law books and hanging diplomas may be no longer be biblio- or text-centric in
nature—perhaps there will be a lonely iPad hanging in the background. And
the next Isaac Newton or Karl Marx may just as likely be doing his research in
film and sound archives as in the reading rooms of the British Library or the
Bodleian.
That film and sound assets are coming to govern our information intake
may, on balance, be a good thing. As it happens, most of the people who are
alive on the planet today believe that the creator of the universe has written a
book, and most of them are animated one way or another by a literal reading
of key parts of it. These key parts often embrace ostensibly God-given com-
mandments to be violently intolerant. Philosopher Sam Harris reminds us that
this literally literal reading of text—indeed, the sanctity we give to text—might
represent “ignorance at its most rococo.” Imagine, as Harris does, a world in
which generations of human beings had come to believe that God had produced
certain films, or for that matter had coded particular pieces of software. Imagine
a future, as Harris does, in which millions of our descendants were threatening
and even murdering each other over rival interpretations of movies like “Star
Wars” or operating systems like Mac OS X.12
When, on our night flight, information that is audiovisual in nature makes
the world less reliant on text for knowledge, and when even more of us have
the ability to express ourselves in audiovisual media, perhaps we will be able

12 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
 Oral History in the Video Age 7

to explore more new avenues like these. By engaging systematically with new
technologies, new publics, and new partners, oral history as a profession has a
huge role to play in what may well be our next big hit: the new Enlightenment.

Peter B. Kaufman is President and Executive Producer of Intelligent Television (http://www.

intelligenttelevision.com) and the Intelligent Channel (http://www.youtube.com/intelligentch-
annel). He previously served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for New Media
Teaching and Learning (http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/). Educated at Cornell and Columbia, he is
the author of numerous articles on media and education and is finishing a new book, The New
Enlightenment: Film, Sound, and Knowledge in the 21st Century, for Seven Stories Press. E-mail:
pbk@intelligenttv.com.