These are my notes from the panel presentation, “Unlocking the Past: Techniques for Conducting Meaningful Interviews” at the “Oral History for the 21st Century” Symposium in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This conference is sponsored by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries, Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma Historical Records Advisory Board, Oklahoma Humanities Council, Oklahoma Museums Association, and Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. It is funded, in part, by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

A link shared by one of our panelists today – COHE: Committee for Oral History Education

Comments from Larry O’Dell, Director of Collections, Oklahoma History Center Research Department

Every year we have a year-long exhibit, and we spend 2 years getting ready for that
- for any exhibit, we want to include an oral history element
- last year or exhibit was on Rock and Roll
- we use a crew and professional equipment to conduct interviews

I want to know as much about the subject as I can
- prior to interview: I have key points we want people to address and cover
- sometimes I ask one question and the person just “goes”

Most important thing: listening and letting people taking the time they need to say what they need to say
- trying not to interrupt

I am not there to show them what I know, I’m there to listen to them
- it’s not the interviewer, it’s about the interviewee

Comments from Mary Larson, Oklahoma Oral History Research Program, Oklahoma State University

You want to listen to what people are telling you
- even if you have a question list or outline
- listen to what people are telling you and respond to their answers to your questions

always write down questions with paper and pencil
- at a pause, ask your question
- don’t interrupt to get a point of detail, that will cause people to lose their focus 60-70% of the time

give people room to navigate
I worked at the Univ of Alaska Fairbanks
- worked a lot with native people and native organizational leaders, including elders
- sometimes when I asked a question an elder would start to answer and I’d think they were saying unrelated things, but they were not: They were giving me background to what they wanted to say and the point they wanted to make

Sometimes it does happen that an interview goes off the rails
- complete loss of control for the interview process
- if this happens, you can reel in the interviewee with a statement. Repeat a fact that they’ve addressed, and ask them for more detail or elaboration about that event/episode.

Journalists in general tend to be more aggressive and up front
- generally we are not trying to be that controversial
- because you’re looking for a particular person’s perspetive, you don’t want to argue with them or contradict them
- don’t mention the other people’s names if you bring up a contrary perspective
- say something like: “Well, someone else told me that Rocky the squirrel was responsible for bombing the popcorn plant.”
- bring it up in a non-controversial way: don’t argue, just ask for why they think something is different

If you are doing family histories, working in a small community, try to keep people from speaking in shorthand
- people have nicknames, people may not know who your “Uncle Stinky” was
- have people give you real names
- lots of acronyms in the federal government
- be sure if someone uses an acronym and you don’t know what it stands for, ask them
- there is no shame in action
- you can always say, “For the people who may be listening to this later, can you give some more background on….”

Always be respectful of the people you are working with, they are giving you a great gift by spending time talking with you
- do your background research, that is a sign of respect
- always be prepared

Comments from

It all boils down to repoire
- basic human skills of sitting down with another human being and drawing them out
- actual sitting down and doing the interview hasn’t changed since the first interviews were done
- bells and whistles / technology hasn’t changed this
- listening well, eye contact, nodding, smiling, pays off

I’ve done interviews with people across the spectrum
- no one has ever asked me where I am coming from on an issue
- you are spending time with them, getting to know them
- for elderly people, remembering names they know and events they lived in creates a bond, sometimes it creates a friendship
- the more comfortable the interviewee is with me, the more candid they are
- example of someone on the 3rd interview saying: “I’ve been giving it to you sugar coated, now I’m going to tell it to you how it was.”

Value of reflection and time, multiple interviews
- 2nd and 3rd interview, often draws out richer veins of information from individuals
- different ways to do this
- some people open up immediately
- others are shy, may feel they are betraying something by talking to you
- let them know they can impose legal restrictions on the interview and how it’s shared, can review the transcript

Question for the panel: What if the interviewee forgets something and gets stuck

- Photographs can be helpful
– think of peoples memories as a treasure chest, there are different ways to pick the lock
– different things can jog their memories
– I like interviewing people in their homes because often they have mnemonic devices all around them: memory cues on walls and tables

older people think of oral history interviews with names and dates, and thinks if they don’t remember those they will flunk
- if you prep those dates and talk about them first, that can help get those out of the way

Question: Better to interview at someone’s house or a neutral location
- be sure to control the sound environment as best you can
- ask people to turn OFF cell phones, not just silence them: with digital recorders now we have these interference issues that we never had with analog recorders

Equipment recommendations:
- built in recorder in Marantz recorder really works great (with analog recorders, built-in mics often picked up machine noise, that is not true now
- change batteries in recorders often to make sure nothing is lost
- Larry’s audio crew uses two mics: both a lavalier and a boom mic

Legal release forms generally give you rights to reuses your interviews in public presentations
- follow the golden rule
- many people love the public attention
- many in the Senate have wanted things to go up immediately, we don’t put things in our historical archive online that focus on people who are alive

cover your ethical and legal bases
- generally give people a chance to review and be involved in the possible uses for their oral histories
- have a very honest conversation with people about this

Technorati Tags:
audio, history, interview, oral, oralhistory, record, recording, interviewing

On this day..

• Fast Forward: Oral History in the 21st Century by Donald Ritchie - 2009
• Video Tributes to Oklahoma Veterans - 2009
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education - 2008
• Podcast204: How Can I Create a Podcast? Let Me Count the Ways! by Lance Ford - 2007
• XO Laptop Give One Get One - 2007
• Overt and covert messages in signs - 2007
• Underacheivement - 2005
• Blogs & RSS: Tapping into the global conversation - 2005
• Transparency in Higher Education - 2005
• A new digital divide? - 2005

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under digitalstorytelling, history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

findingDulcinea is such a great way to stay connected to history...LOVE this service.

By now we can probably all agree that the iPhone is the Model T, the Sputnik, the Lawrence Taylor of the mobile technology realm. We are still waiting for the offenses to adapt, the competition to catch up.

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Some of us are losing patience.

I have spent the last few weeks speaking with mobile technology researchers about hardware and software innovations that could, within two years, create a phone good enough to make the 2009 iPhone seem like a quaint relic.

The important takeaway is that the mobile devices of late 2011 might physically resemble the smartphones of today, but they will be much more computer than phone. Call it a PC, but this time it will be “personal” for real, because it will virtually never leave your person.

Today’s smartphones can do almost anything a PC could do in 2007, but in a couple of years smartphones may have enough computing power to enable much more sophisticated applications that truly take advantage of the device’s portability.

Just imagine a device with an 8-inch fold-out screen, a big virtual keyboard for easy text input, numerous sensors to detect your surroundings, and software smart enough to anticipate your needs and sharp enough to respond to conversational commands.

Open up the device, point it at the street and ask it to show you what the place looked like 200 years ago, and it offers a photo or video. Ask it where to eat lunch and it highlights a restaurant that suits your tastes. If you are heatedly debating food choices with a companion when someone of marginal importance tries to call you, the phone will know better than to interrupt.

This blue-sky, composite prediction comes with a stiff warning: forecasts with a two-year horizon are especially chancy, technologists said, since those making the predictions are often overly optimistic about emerging designs and, at the same time, blind to some of the reasons the current generation of technologies looks as it does.

But why spoil things? Here is what you may see in your next device upgrade, two years down the line.

Research and development teams at technology incubators like SRI International, PARC and MIT’s Media Lab, as well as designers and technologists at companies like Nokia, Intel and others said smartphones of the future would not look much different from those today.

But James Begole, a principal scientist at PARC, the research lab based in Palo Alto, Calif., that was formerly known as Xerox PARC, said screens, at least, would be fundamentally different. “The one hardware development I’m feeling most certain about,” he said, “is foldable displays.”

Dr. Begole, who is known as Bo, said the current availability of the Readius (Readius.com), an e-book reader with an expandable display, suggested that smartphone makers could incorporate something similar in their devices within two years.

Researchers are also experimenting with virtual keyboards, he said, to overcome the size constraints of phone-based keyboards. With these, users move their fingers over an imaginary keypad, and sensors infer the keystrokes. (See senseboard.com for an example.)

But if displays are bigger, touch-screen typing may work just fine, said Norman Winarsky, a vice president at SRI International, another technology incubator based in Palo Alto. Dr. Winarsky said SRI had created “an electroactive polymer that vibrates beneath the glass, and gives your fingers the sense of touching individual keys.”

That technology, he said, is within 24 months of reaching the market.

Henry Tirri, the Nokia senior vice president in charge of the company’s global research centers, said cellphones of the not-so-distant future would contain supersensors, like higher-quality camera lenses that will see faraway detail much more clearly than the naked eye.

(This is different from the multitude of external sensors, like heart-rate monitors, thermostat readers and others that now — or will quite soon — connect to your smartphone.)

So if you are on the street and looking toward the top of the Empire State Building with your smartphone, Dr. Tirri said, it will infer the visual elements you are interested in, and fetch close-up images from the Web.

This sort of “augmented reality” approach, as it’s known in the tech industry, could also allow users to see their surroundings as they may have appeared in another era.

Somewhat along these lines, PARC and SRI International have also spawned software that, using GPS sensors and data about the user’s past behavior or current calendar, can suggest nearby restaurants, among other things.

PARC’s software, called Magitti, is in its testing phase in Japan, and could reach the American market in the spring of next year.

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Sign in to Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on November 5, 2009, on page B8 of the New York edition.