This two-part introduction to oral history explores both the practical and ethical considerations involved in working with recorded voices.
Across two sessions, participants will be guided through the full lifecycle of oral history practice – how to record and care for oral histories, and how to make thoughtful decisions when oral history material is shared publicly through exhibitions, publications, or digital formats.
Each session is booked individually, and there is no expectation to attend both if you do not feel the need to. Booking links and individual session details can be found below.
When Oral History Goes Public: Making Decisions about Outputs
This session focuses on what happens to oral history material when it goes public – about audiences, and the relevant editorial, ethical, and practical decisions that are involved in shaping different output forms. The session will open with a short introduction to public oral history, followed by three short case studies drawn from current projects. Silvie Fisch, Director of Northern Cultural Projects, will draw on the Byker Community Archive to examine the decisions involved in producing social media content, community exhibitions and archiving from interview material. Liz O’Donnell, former archivist at Northumberland Archive and now an associate researcher, will discuss the Stannington Children’s Hospital project and the particular challenges of working across radio, fiction, and poetry as output forms. Graham Smith will draw on oral history work with Ukrainian communities to consider how the same material functions differently across journal articles, exhibitions, and a popular book.
The session will then work through the output formats most relevant to community groups (including exhibition and display, audio and podcast production, print publication, and digital archiving), examining what each format does to oral history material and to the narrator’s voice. Participants will get to work in small groups with a short piece of oral history material, thinking through how it would function in two different output formats and making their decisions explicit.
A closing discussion will return to participants’ own projects, looking at the constraints – resources, funder requirements, narrator relationships – that shape real choices. Throughout, the question is not which output form is best, but what each one does, who benefits, and what is made visible or obscured in the process.
The Newcastle University Oral History Collective is a research and practice group based at Newcastle University. Its members include community practitioners, academics, and archivists, who work with oral history as both a memory-based method and a historical source. The Collective has a sustained record of co-produced public oral history work across the Northeast, the UK, and internationally.