I came across this article today that I thought brought up a lot of good points about the "danger" of not providing an accurate description of the nature of oral history projects (thus leading people to believe it can be used for historical FACTS.)
The link is below
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20853588/
As a quick overview- A Library of Congress collection of Vietnam Veteran's oral histories has come under scrutiny (and indeed is being altered) after it was discovered that some interviewees lied about honors received, and in turn were incorrectly listed at Medal of Honor Recipients.
The question of why there wasn't more "fact checking" before the site went up was met with some explanation about the nature of oral history projects (within the msn article at least)
“There are 50,000 oral histories that are involved in the Veterans History Project, it’s got a very small staff and it gets at the philosophical underpinning of what an oral history project is. … It’s not intended to be a historical record. They are personal, firsthand accounts.”
In our work this semester, it will be interesting to see how much of an issue fact versus memory becomes.
What is the best way to present an oral history account containing "misinformation" in conjunction with listed facts (as the Library of Congress website had to)? In this case, it seems the error was in not fact checking the actual Medal of Honor recipients against the account of those they interviewed, and not putting enough emphasis on oral history as a HUMAN account of an event, not a database to be mined for absolute truths.
At the end of the article, there was advice on how this might have been prevented:
"The Library of Congress could easily require participants in the Veterans History Project to fill out paperwork authorizing release of their entire service records in the event that questions are raised about their accounts."
Thoughts?
Comments (1)
This a great article to think through - and shows the contested nature of certain histories in the US. One of the motivations of Oral History projects is often to demonstrate that not only the people at the top should get to define what is true...at the same time many oral histories have been undermined by factual inconsistencies (see debates about Rigoberto Menchu's testimony, and debates about using Holocaust survivor testimony in court). What is the balance between history as experience and history as a more distanced view of the past?
Posted by Haidy Geismar | September 20, 2007 8:37 AM
Posted on September 20, 2007 08:37