"The History of Oral History"

In this video, Ronal J. Grele presents his book "Envelops of Sounds : The Art of Oral History". He is the former director of the Oral History Research Office. He also talks about some aspects. I have chosen the part about acurracy and interpretation (circa 1'03 to 3'04). I think it is a complement for our articles about procedures and limits.

"It does posed for us the transformation from the recorders. I describe this transformation as a transformation from a concern for data, to a concern with text. When I began Oral History, my concern was to recreate the past. To ask people about what happen in the past. To gather data about what actually happenned. And that was generally the attitude of most scientists into the interviews. It was a search for data and we were concerned with accuracy. We talk about memory. We talk about memory as an accuracy. How accurate was this memory? How could we test for the accuracy? How can we look at the interviews in such ways to understand how the interaction underminds the accuracy of memory, what promoted the accuracy of memory. If we are interested in interpretation, the interpretation rested with the interviewers' history. People will provide us with information and the interpretation will be ours. [...] the historians who collect the data and then interprate. There were couple of people who raised the question : maybe when people tell theirs histories they are already interpreting and maybe that's a first interpretation."

Flore-Hélène Fischer