Old Stories, New Mediums: Capturing Oral Histories Digitally in 6 Easy Steps
This lady. She’s the reason I’m looking into the realm of oral history and its digitization. Perhaps you have someone like her in your life: A beloved grandma, uncle, aunt, parent, or friend; someone whose voice has always shaped your experiences in the world, whose stories are not only part of your hereditary recollection, but a part of who you are. Would you want that voice to fade? Would you want those stories to one day become silenced, untold, lost? If not, keep reading.
This photograph was taken in late August, 2015, when my grandmother Nunu (“Hpee Hpee” is the name for grandma in Burmese) visited my brother and sister-in-law in Guthrie, Oklahoma. They had just moved into a new house, given birth to a beautiful baby girl, and needed some quality time with Hpee Hpee: namely, great stories and delicious Burmese dishes. Weeks later, my brother called me, incredulous.
“Did you know that lady still has new stories we haven’t heard? I was scrambling to write them down, but between the infant strapped to my chest and a toddler wanting to play nonstop, my efforts proved futile.”
My brother’s regret was a frequently uttered one, not only by him, but by almost every surviving member of my family that has witnessed compelling family stories— either firsthand or through oral storytelling. We were comforted when the most animated storyteller of them all, my grandfather (“Bobo”) Spencer, was able to publish a book of his life experiences before passing away early 2008. Yet, despite the detail and apparent immortality of a physical book, the aural magic of the stories somehow became lost between the stark black and white confines ink and paper. Where were the laughs, the chuckles, the way you can hear someone smiling by the tenor of their voice? What about the heavy sighs, the slight vocal tremors, or pauses thick with emotion? The voices of our loved ones are so faceted and full of meaning, full of life. However once these voices cease to be heard, how our memories of their sounds and utterances begin to fade — familial tracings fading with time, loss, and new life.
But it does not have to be so. Keeping an audio archive of these stories, though it my sound like a time-consuming initiative, is a worthwhile investment into preserving family histories, for your generation as well as those to come. Not only the nuance and grit of the stories themselves will be captured, but the unique personalities that hue your family narrative, your sense of self. So how to go about such an initiative?
Skype, Audacity, and Other Helpful Podcasting Programs: A Process-Based Tutorial
Please note that the following tutorial is less an in-depth how-to of a specific DH tool, but an introduction of a variety of programs and an exploration of how they fit together in order to facilitate oral history capturing initiatives — particularly in the format of podcast interviews. I will provide links to each program referenced that will further supplement your knowledge and support you in the event of technical roadblocks.
Some Things to Consider:
We are lucky enough to be living in an age where opportunities to preserve audio abound. The basic mp3 sound file — requiring little space while providing near-CD quality sound — can ensure the audio recording will stay intact and accessible, as long as it’s able to be continually converted. And thus far, mp3s have proven to be pretty infinitely adaptable.
With usage of mp3s as audio archive building blocks in mind, our next decision is how to organize, store, and perhaps even share these stories. There are, of course, a myriad of ways to accomplish this, all of them dependent upon a number of factors:
- How wide would you like the audience to be?
- What is the purpose of your oral history project? Personal? Public?
- How would you like the final product to be available? Organized?
- Would you like to incorporate visual components?
- Do you merely want to capture their stories without mediation, or mixing in the voices of others?
- How would you like to organize your content? Would piecing together a linear narrative be most meaningful, or capturing a more thematic, episodic structure?
- How robust would you like the archival preservation to be?
- What monetary and personal time resources do you have available for this project (i.e. how broke and lazy, albeit well-meaning are you in completing such an initiative)?
Skype Meets Podcasting: A Simple, Yet Far-Reaching Union
For the purposes of this particular project, I envision capturing oral stories via Skype conversations (mostly), in an interview format. And what better way than to utilize the growing momentum of podcasting? Here’s why.
I’m choosing to utilize podcast-style audio recordings in order to orient my own identity within the ongoing narrative of familial voices. Podcasting is a great way to tell personal stories with a vast potential for capturing the imagination of a public audience.
I’m also choosing to use Skype in order to conduct the interviews, as both time and space are of great import in digitizing a robust oral history — and Skype is a convenient tool for bridging geographical gaps.
Along the spatial and temporal span of any family narrative, there is likely a complex network of storytellers who can each reveal a facet of one’s heritage. The snapshot below is just one small fragment of the myriad voices of family members (though some have passed) spread out across the globe, from Europe, Asia, the States, and even Australia and New Zealand.
It is not uncommon to have family and friends dispersed globally — and as convenient as that might be for the perpetual globe trotter/couch-surfer, it is less convenient for a digital humanist attempting to record their stories authentically and professionally (i.e. not via answering machine phone tag, recorded phone calls, or reading correspondences aloud). While the allure of traveling to the exotic nooks and crannies of the globe to retrieve voices of your family narrative is abundant, money and time is often far less so. So what is the digital humanist to do? Well, let me break it down for you.
Step 1: Download Skype. Make sure others download Skype.
Skype for oral history interviews? Indeed. As fairly ubiquitous and technically unchallenging as it seems, Skype can be a dynamic tool for you to use in hunting down stories and interview opportunities in the most remote and seemingly out-of-reach places (to an extent — internet service is a must here). In a nutshell, Skype, much like Google Hangouts, is a web-based video chat platform that boasts wide popularity across the globe. It’s user-friendly with a minimal learning curve, and offers robust support in the form of a Help Guide and active Community hub. Further, Skype in particular interfaces with powerful social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. For those not yet familiar with Skyping, it allows you to have all the nuances of a conversation with the added thrill of face time — the next best thing to chatting person-to-person over a fragrant bowl of curry at a cafe in Burma.
All you need to do to get started is create a username, and find and invite other members to join. Once you have located your interviewees, you can initiate a video or audio chat by selecting the corresponding icon by their profile header. Once both parties are in a call, you can select the red phone icon to terminate the session. Of course, this will be after you’ve gleaned a bevy of compelling podcast material for your archive.
You can download the basic app for free if you haven’t, then all you need to do is ensure the party opposite your Skype call has the app as well. It takes two to tango, record a high-quality interview for a podcast series, etc.
Now, before you ride off into the sunset to go Skype your way across the globe, you will also need to invest in an audio recording software. This is a necessary component to ensuring your interviews are not only captured and stored, but also editable. My chosen program is Audacity. It’s a pretty robust sound editing tool that is beginner-friendly, and if that doesn’t sell you on it already — did I mention it’s free?
Step 2: Download Audacity.
Though Audacity is pretty intuitive both to download and explore, it also provides comprehensive support for its users, including a detailed manual and quick help guide, as well as an expansive user forum. Audacity also boasts a continually updated list of plug-ins available for free download, therefore boosting the user’s experience without any added cost (we will touch more on this later). Though Audacity may not offer all of the bells an whistles of other audio editing programs available for purchase, it provides enough functionality for the DH fledgling looking to get their feet wet with audio recording and editing. And even among similarly free audio recording and editing programs, Audacity stands out as the most popular contender for its support community and its supplemental plug-ins.
In order to have Audacity up and ready to record your Skype audio, you must head to their download page, and click the link that correlates with your computer specs.
After you select your download, you will then be prompted to choose from a list of “Recommended Downloads” and “Optional Downloads.” For the purposes of this project, I chose the Audacity 2.1.1 installer, versus the less robust zip file (which does not include help files). You will also need to download the LAME MP3 encoder, which allows you to export audio files from Audacity in mp3 (podcast-friendly) format.
Once you have finished downloading Audacity, navigate back to the download page and select the “LAME MP3 encoder” link. You should then be redirected to the corresponding Audacity help manual wiki page, which includes step-by-step instructions for downloading LAME, as well as link to the LAME download page (illustrated below):
Follow the instructions for downloading LAME as provided in the Audacity wiki page, using the link provided. You should now have all of the software needed on your computer to begin recording and editing audio.
Step 3: Configure the mixer on your PC.
Before you begin, you must first make sure your PC is configured so that the Stereo Mixer is enabled. The Stereo Mixer allows all audio coming from and entering headphones and speakers is available to be captured. That way both parties contributions of the Skype chat will be directly available for import into Audacity. Here is a great step-by-step guide to enabling your Stereo Mixer (PC only — Mac users can find an alternative set up here).
Step 4: Trial Run (What Recording your Skype Session Will Look Like)
Have both Skype and Audacity up and running. First, navigate to the Audacity window and make sure your speaker selections are as follows:
Next, start a recording session by clicking the record button icon. Then, initiate a Skype Call via the instructions provided in Step 1. For the purposes of this example, I’m going to call the Echo/Sound Test Service which can be found in the default Contacts (or by typing it into the search contacts bar). A recorded voice will play that will then ask you to record a message. This will help you assess the quality of the audio you will be recording, and practice with editing.
If you were able to complete this process and successfully record input and output audio from Skype, you should be ready to record your first interview. Some Skype interview etiquette and useful reminders:
- Have a list of questions on hand, organized in the order that seems most logical. Don’t be afraid to deviate to fit the flow of conversation, however.
- If possible, provide the interviewee with the list of questions/topics you’d like to cover beforehand, so they are able to prepare on their end.
- Make sure the individual you are interviewing is aware they are being recorded.
- You should also debrief your Skype counterpart on the nature of the project and how their voice fits in, so that they will not feel they are being taken out of context. It is also good to include an introductory segment in the Skype interview.
- Feel free to be casual and conversational — let the topics and stories manifest freely, guided by the general subjects you’d like to touch on. Sometimes the best content evolves extemporaneously, or from seemingly filler space. As mentioned earlier, you can always edit out or remix the order of recorded audio.
The Library of Congress has another useful guide on conducting oral history interviews.
Step 5: Edit, Convert, Publish
Once you have captured and edited the sound file from your interview session, you need to convert it to MP3 format so that it can be easily uploaded online. This video will help you through that process:
Next, and perhaps most critically to immortalizing and sharing your podcast series, you must choose a platform from which to publish. There are many options available, some more robust (and more costly), others free with less user control over site content (such as advertisements). As aforementioned, it is important to decide who your audience for your oral history series will be, and how best it would be to reach them. In my case, I am creating a digitized oral history archive first and foremost as a resource for my family. In the future I hope to work outward from this base in communicating theses stories to a larger sphere, interjected into ongoing social justice issues. But for now, I will need a reliable and user-friendly space to collect my podcasts — for this I chose WordPress.
Wordpress is a great tool for the novice blogger or website creator who needs a home for their portfolios, business information, blog posts, or in this case, podcasts. Because it is supported through advertisements, the most basic package is free for users. However, in order to purchase my own domain and to enjoy increased space for audio uploads, I went with the Premium Package. One of my favorite features of WordPress is its ever-growing variety of customizable templates — you will almost certainly be able to find one to fit the look/feel of your project, without sweating about the coding side of things. Here’s what I currently have in-the-making:
Like all of the tools I have chosen to use for this initiative, WordPress boasts a comprehensive support team to facilitate novice and seasoned digital humanists alike. Here is the process for uploading your audio onto your WordPress webpage.
Step 6: Evolve and Repeat. Both digitally and as a dialogue.
Make changes to steps 1–5 as necessary. Keep the process alive so the product will thrive and continue to reach the ears of future generations — within and without your family.
Podcasting may seem like an overwhelming initiative to take on; however, with some basic equipment — even as pedestrian as a computer or laptop, and a viable internet connection — the makings of a podcast are already underway. In other words: if this fledgling digital humanist can do it, there’s hope for anyone, including you, to create a robust archive of podcast-style audio files. There’s always room to innovate, expand on, and further promulgate your project. But time passes quickly, and with it, cherished memories and voices fade, so when it comes to preserving your heritage digitally, the best time to start is now.
