Hi Robin, Thanks so much for your comments.
I was thinking of a completely automated process. I'm thinking of it as oral history because, at least in the initial use of the program, we'd use a set list of questions for all respondents. I realise it probably won't be as good/useful as the product of a trained interviewer, and the system could accommodate machine and human mediation. That could be a part of the metadata so you could analyze how people respond to human vs computer questioning. Another possibility would be to use one set of questions for the computer interview, then invite participants to schedule a person-to-person interview. Kind of like recruiting people into a cult.
I guess the main thing I'm trying to do is leverage technology to get oral histories available in an admittedly less-than-perfect form as quickly as possible so it can be improved via crowd sourcing. The interview's the easy part, but there's often a lag until it becomes useable. If people are committed and know what they're doing, the loop closes with a searchable archive of transcribed interviews. This is for people and organizations who are kind of committed and don't really know what they're doing.
Thanks again for your thoughts and the links! Paul On 10/2/12 3:39 PM, Robin Dean wrote:
Hi Paul, Just to clarify what you mean by "automated"--are you looking for a process that completely removes the need for an interviewer, and only involves people recording their answers to a questionnaire alone with a machine? The seems to be the model the "Outhouse" project was experimenting with. Even then, this article says that in one of the Outhouse initiatives, "around half" of the participants preferred to do face-to-face interviews rather than be recorded alone in a booth: http://camra.culturemap.org.au/central-darling/outhouse-research I think it's a good idea to digitally capture more first-person stories, but I have trouble thinking of them as "oral histories" without a human interviewer. If you're interested, here are a couple more projects that are looking at how to increase the number of digital oral histories that are captured, preserved, and usefully made accessible. Colorado Voice Preserve (they are currently looking at the infrastructure needed for a statewide oral history initiative, including technical requirements): http://www.voicepreserve.org IMLS "Oral History in the Digital Age" site: http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/ Best, Robin Dean Director, Alliance Digital Repository Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries http://adrresources.coalliance.org/
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