Oral History in the New York Times

Do oral history, politics and journalism ever meet?  They did in September.  In the multilayered reporting on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Linda Greenhouse, longtime New York Times reporter on the Supreme Court, used an oral history from our Guantánamo/Rule of Law Project to discuss how Supreme Court decisions regarding key Guantánamo cases were processed by the D.C. District Court – where Mr. Kavanaugh sits (her article can be found here). We are proud that our Guantánamo/Rule of Law Project has been widely used, by professors of law, journalists and authors to increase an understanding of the law and justice.

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Announcing the New Director of OHMA

OHMA is excited to announce that as of July 1, 2018, Amy Starecheski will become the Director of OHMA. 

Mary Marshall Clark, with whom Amy has been co-directing the program, will become a Founding Co-Director, with Peter Bearman. Mary Marshall will continue teaching our core Oral History Method, Theory, and Interpretation and Thesis Seminar courses and advising students and will continue as the Director of the Center for Oral History Research. Please join us in thanking Mary Marshall and welcoming her into her new role, and congratulating Amy.

Amy and Mary Marshall each have some thoughts to share at this moment of transition:
 

The moment Amy Starecheski stepped into the Center for Oral History Research in 1997, and I talked with her, I knew we had struck gold. I hired her as a work-study student to audit-edit transcripts and soon she was giving me sage advice about who was succeeding as an interviewer as who was not. I was sorry when she graduated, and missed her advice!  Only a few years later, Peter Bearman and I began the September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, and I called Amy to see if she would be willing to do interviews for us. She quickly became one of our most talented, sensitive and effective interviewers while she was still in her mid-twenties. She went on to teach in our summer institutes and lead a major global oral history project on the history of Atlantic Philanthropies.  As she was leaving Columbia to earn her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at City University of New York, I let her know she would have a permanent place at Columbia and in the world of oral history when she was ready to return.  I kept my fingers crossed and she did.  In 2012 she came to co-direct OHMA with me and shaping OHMA with Amy has been one of the great joys of my career. It is a tremendous pleasure for me to watch Amy take the reins of OHMA and emerge as one of the most inspiring leaders and scholars of oral history in our times.  I am lucky to continue to work with her and with OHMA, and watch her successes close by.  Of course, the program would not exist without the generosity, intellectual rigor and support of Peter Bearman, founding co-director of OHMA, who also watches from close by, and who made our dream of an MA program possible.

- Mary Marshall Clark
 

I am honored to take on the role of Director of OHMA. I would like to take this opportunity to recognize Mary Marshall’s ten years of leadership of OHMA, and the many years before that during which she developed and nurtured the idea of this program. Without Mary Marshall Clark, OHMA would not exist. Her extraordinary combination of personal care, critical engagement, and intellectual rigor has shaped this program at its deepest levels and has transformed ten cohorts of students. I know at a very personal level how valuable her mentoring is, as I have been lucky enough to benefit from it for over twenty years now. This spirit of generosity in training future generations of oral historians is what animates OHMA. As we prepare to welcome our 11th cohort this fall, I am grateful that future students will continue to benefit from her teaching, guidance, and support, and even more grateful that I will! 

- Amy Starecheski

Announcing the 2018 CCOHR Oral History Transcription Style Guide!

We at the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) are proud to announce the release of our Oral History Transcription Style Guide! This guide includes comprehensive sections on the transcription process, formatting (including templates), fact-checking, editing and review, and specific style rules. CCOHR Director Mary Marshall Clark had this to say about the guide: "We are proud of releasing this guide to oral history transcription and editing, filled with insights culled over seven decades of work and processing thousands of oral history interviews. The purpose of this guide is to make our ethical and technical procedures for translating the spoken word into written form fully transparent and useable, while simultaneously demonstrating oral history's deep debt to literature and rich, open-ended dialogue."

Begun in 2016, this style guide takes to heart the philosophy of CCOHR's oral history practice regarding transcripts, described here in the guide: "Our transcripts must clearly communicate a speaker’s intended meaning in text, serve as useful and accessible primary source material, and represent the co-creation inherent in the oral history interview and transcription process." 

The style guide's creation was led by oral historian Liz Strong in consultation with the team here at CCOHR and INCITE, primarily with CCOHR Director Mary Marshall Clark and former INCITE/CCOHR project manager Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux. Others who offered their invaluable advice include David Olson (Columbia), Amy Starecheski (Columbia), Doug Boyd (University of Kentucky), Michael Sesling (Audio Transcription Center), Michelle Holland (Baylor), Teresa Barnett (UCLA), Martin Meeker (UC Berkeley), and Jaycie Vos (UNC Chapel Hill).

Our hope for this style guide is that it will be a go-to resource for those preparing oral history transcripts that respect the spontaneity of the spoken word and the literary qualities of the written word, for broad public access.

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Dr. Michelle Winslow Discusses Oral History in Palliative and End-of-Life Care at the 2017 Oral History Summer Institute

Dr. Winslow speaks at the 2017 CCOHR Oral History Summer Institute.

By Fanny Julissa García, Summer Institute Communications Coordinator

During the second week of the 2017 Oral History Summer Institute, fellows welcomed Dr. Michelle Winslow, who traveled from Sheffield in the United Kingdom to present her use of oral history in palliative and end-of-life care. Dr. Winslow is the co-founder of the oral history service at the Sheffield Macmillan Unit for Palliative Care, where she pairs volunteers with patients interested in producing audio recordings of their life history. Preparation for these interviews includes training volunteers on oral history practice and interviewing skills.

Palliative care, as Dr. Winslow explained, includes the act of caring for people who are facing serious illness and end-of-life processes. The care patients receive helps to improve quality of life and aims to relieve pain and other distressing symptoms, including the psychological impacts of illness, which can include depression and anxiety.

The goal here is to normalize dying as a fact of life, and she uses oral history to help individuals remember themselves before they became ill. Long-term illness, she said, can disrupt a person’s sense of self, and oral history provides an opportunity to restore dignity, autonomy and affirm life.

Dr. Winslow’s oral history service creates high quality voice recordings, which enhance holistic care and benefits both participants and families. The oral history service uses the life history method to produce a multi-layered audio and written document of the person’s entire life. “Recalling and describing life events brings to light underlying patterns of meaning,” says Dr. Winslow, and may help participants conclude “unfinished business,” as well as appreciate the interest taken in them as people.

Many of the recordings are archived and available for research and Dr. Winslow explained that an added benefit of the oral history service and the process of recording patients in end-of-life oral history interviews is that they provide healthcare professionals an opportunity to hear these recordings and gain a deeper understanding of terminally ill patients.

Mary Marshall Clark and Cameron Vanderscoff, Co-Directors of the 2017 Oral History Summer Institute believe that what is most fascinating about Dr. Winslow’s work is that “in following the careful path of oral history procedures and ethics, Dr. Winslow has instantiated a flawless oral history program in multiple sites that will only grow.”

Vanderscoff agrees and added, “Her work pushes us to consider not only how our practice can find new traction and purpose in palliative settings, but how we can develop the oral history process itself as an act of care. She connects oral history more closely with an ethic of shared meaning-making, and for revisiting the potential of the life history approach as a positive intervention for both interviewer and narrator.”

For more information about Dr. Michelle’s work, read “Recording Lives: The Benefits of an Oral History Service” in the 2009 edition of the European Journal of Palliative Care.

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Fanny Julissa García is a recent graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the Central American Refugee Crisis and the rise of immigration detention centers in the U.S. She currently works as a social media marketing content writer for various organizations including Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, the Columbia Oral History Master of Arts program, and the CCOHR 2017 Oral History Summer Institute.