Oral History & Oral History Transcription

The term ‘Oral History’ is a broad term referring to any type of verbal historical account, including both formal accounts of history recounted by historians and personal stories recited by the elderly.

Early examples of Oral History include the Great Depression Oral History, which includes the life histories of workers recorded during the late 1930s and early 1940s by Federal Writers Project (FWP), an agency of the New Deal Works Progress Administration to document the ways ordinary people were coping with the hardships of the period. The reliability of such early Oral History reports leaves much to be desired, because they were recorded in writing by human note-takers.

Columbia Oral History Research Office--the largest archival collection of oral history interviews in the world--and the contemporary oral history movement both began with the work of Allan Nevins, at Columbia University, in the 1940s. Starting in the 1960s, Oral Historians became increasingly interested in social history and collecting historical accounts (Oral History interviews) by ‘ordinary’ people (women’s oral history accounts, blue-collar oral history accounts, immigrant oral history, Black oral history and Jewish oral history are a few examples).

The Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project (BAHOHP) is a perfect example of Oral History projects. It gathered oral interviews from Holocaust survivors and witnesses into an Oral History database for use by students, researchers and the public. BAHOHP recently merged with the Holocaust Center of Northern California (HCNC) to form a single organization under the HCNC name. An example of Black Oral History is the Slave Narrative Collection in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress.

Oral History also includes interviews with politicians (foreign affairs oral history and political interviews) and business leaders, which often provide insight into the events behind momentous political decisions or financial deals, etc.

Oral History Projects

The type of an Oral History project will determine the kind of oral history report needed as well as the style of oral history transcription that is most appropriate. It will also define who the expected readers of the Oral History report are and how widely it will be disseminated, i.e. whether it will be included as an Oral History hard copy transcript in the archive of a local library or webcast over the Internet, etc.

A few examples of Oral History project types and Oral History transcripts are:

 

• An individual life history of a single person (this could be a veteran’s oral history; the transcript would be an autobiography transcript)
• Multiple oral history interviews of members of a single community (Jewish oral history, Black oral history or veterans’ oral histories, immigrant oral history …)
• Oral history projects that focus on particular events (Great Depression oral history, Holocaust oral history, World War Two oral history …)

Historians and academic researchers usually produce analytical oral history reports that are well formulated since they are often required to provide a copy of the final oral history report to the funding agency. Community members who have decided to do an oral history to preserve local culture and history usually produce more informal oral history reports. The Oral History transcripts reflect the styles of the reports.

Importance of Oral History Transcription

Transcription makes Oral History interviews far easier to use. Researchers will rarely listen to tapes to obtain the information they are looking for in an oral history interview, and having hard copies to work with helps them find the information they need. Transcriptionohio.com has extensive direct experience in the field of oral history transcription. Our specialized transcriptionists are familiar with oral history methodology and biography transcript styles.

We can accept and deliver transcripts in almost all word processing formats, and our clients select the style and format of transcription they need, depending on the level and type of detail required. For example, Oral History transcripts on disks make searching for specific instances or names much simpler than hard copy Oral History transcripts.

Contact Transcriptionohio.com if you are involved in an Oral History project. We have direct expertise in this area of transcription and we have transcribed numerous oral history projects for a diverse clientele across the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. We accord equal importance to all oral history projects we transcribe, regardless of scope or size.