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SOHP Home > News
"Oral Histories of the American South"
Database Available Online
With the assistance of a $505,232 grant from the Institute for Museum
and Library Services, the SOHP and the UNC Library are nearing completion
of a digitization and publication project that provides unprecedented
online access to more than 500 oral history interviews conducted by the
SOHP over the past thirty years. With this project, "Oral Histories
of the American South," users are already able to search more than
400 interviews by theme, access them at the point of their interest, and,
with a few clicks of the mouse, hear the spoken word, read the related
transcript text, and learn from additional historical commentary. We invite
you to visit the database,
and to send us your thoughts and feedback as the project enters its final
phase.
"Oral Histories of the American South" makes recordings and transcripts
available to a broader audience than ever before. It also utilizes new
technologies for synchronizing sound and text. This project provides access
to previously unheard voices and stories that, taken together, reveal
the everyday choices, vibrant characters, and dramatic events that make
up the history of a unique and rapidly changing region.
Professor Jacquelyn Hall, Spruill Professor of History, has directed the
SOHP since its founding in 1973. "What excites me most," she says, "is
that this project restores the power of the human voice to the heart of
oral history research and use. Because it is so much easier to consult
transcribed text, students and scholars seldom listen to the tapes. Yet
a transcript can't capture how the story is told-the tone, the inflection
of words, the sound of laughter, the catch in the voice, the ironies,
the personal interaction between interviewer and interviewee, the silences
that sometimes speak louder than words. Now people will be able to search
transcripts with ease and, at the same time, hear the many nuances of
meaning in the spoken word."
Public service is a major priority of the project. Scholars throughout
the world can consult our oral history interviews in their richest form
-- as a simultaneous presentation of sound recordings and transcripts.
K-12 teachers and their students can use curriculum materials based on
personal accounts of historical events. The general public can enjoy free
access to materials previously available only to visitors of the UNC Library.
The project also plans to share the software it develops with oral history
projects everywhere.
"This project helps us to fulfill the democratic promise of oral history,"
says Hall. "Many scholars have used our interviews and many books have
drawn upon them. Now more and more students, K-12 teachers, radio documentarians,
and history lovers of all kinds will be able to use them as well."
The three-year project is a collaboration involving the following groups
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the Southern Oral
History Program, the Library/DocSouth, the Center for the Study of the
American South (CSAS), the School of Education, and i-biblio. UNC history
professors Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Harry L. Watson, and Bill Ferris serve
as scholarly advisors to the project. SOHP special projects coordinator
Joe Mosnier leads the SOHP's digitization efforts. Natasha Smith, Digitization
Librarian at the UNC Library, is the Principal Investigator for the grant-funded
initiative. Todd Cooper guides DocSouth's oral history technology development
team.
For more on the project, read the press release below or contact:
Dr. Joseph Mosnier (mosnier@email.unc.edu)
Southern Oral History Program
Center for the Study of the American South
Love House and Hutchins Forum
410 E. Franklin St. CB#9127
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-9127
(919) 962-0455
This press release includes more detailed background information
on the project's technology goals, the SOHP, and DocSouth:
Background and details on the initiative's technology goals:
Interest in the Southern Oral History Program Collection continues to
expand among an audience ranging from research scholars to members of
the general public. Accordingly, the current project is tailored to provide
direct benefit by answering the varying needs of these diverse constituencies,
and is expected to have national and international impacts. For research
scholars and other academic users, including those far beyond the United
States, the present project will facilitate not only access - in itself,
a critical achievement - but a qualitative advance in the ease-of-use
of oral history materials. Oral history audio tapes and transcripts, though
rich in historical value and interest, traditionally have been relatively
cumbersome primary historical resources for all users. The technology
model we propose will substantially erase these barriers and provide convenient,
efficient access by providing any user, anywhere, via a standard web browser
the empowering combination of synchronized (linked) transcript text and
audio delivery; intelligent metadata schemes employing controlled vocabularies
and Boolean search capabilities (in addition to fully searchable transcript
text); and simultaneous interrogation of entire thematic sub-collections
of large sets of interviews. This combination of new tools allows instant
and fluid access to the contents of huge groups of oral history interviews,
shattering the previous barriers that have tended to limit and restrict
access and ease-of-use.
In this new approach, with a few mouse clicks a scholar will search large
sets of oral history interviews according to user-preferred Boolean conditions
within collection-appropriate controlled vocabularies and other intelligent
indexing, and be directed instantly to the relevant portions of the linked
audio and transcript text portions for all matching interviews. While
reviewing the transcript sections, she will also have access to the corresponding
audio stream - the ultimate, unmediated historical asset - and will be
empowered to capture this material (within the bounds of copyright usage)
for inclusion within scholarly writing, educational materials, or an infinite
array of multi-media end products.
One can readily envision how such access and ease-of-use will revolutionize
and expand the already burgeoning interest in oral history among all user
constituencies. Scholars, for example, will no longer have to travel to
the archive and be forced to wade through printed transcripts and listen
in real time to oral history audio that cannot be intelligently searched.
Instead, from any web browser, they will exploit the new search capacities
to discover new patterns in vast groups of oral history interviews, prospectively
leading to critical new insights and analyses; they will investigate oral
history as a primary source in their scholarship much more routinely;
and they will use simple copy-and-paste keyboard strokes to capture text,
full citations, and audio segments for incorporation in their scholarly
products, greatly increasing their overall research productivity. Taken
together, these innovations represent a true revolution for the field
of academic oral history, and historical scholarship more generally.
Background and details on the Southern Oral History Program:
Founded in 1973, the Southern Oral History Program seeks to foster a critical
yet democratic understanding of the South - its history, culture, problems,
and prospects. The SOHP has recorded more than 3,600 interviews with men
and women from all walks of life, and currently maintains an active research
and teaching program. SOHP tapes, transcripts, and videos are preserved
in the Southern Historical Collection of Wilson Library, one of the country's
foremost repositories for research materials on the American South. Each
year hundreds of researchers - scholars, students, family historians,
and local history enthusiasts - make use of SOHP materials.
The Southern Oral History Program Collection, the leading oral history
collection related to the U.S. South and one of the nation's most significant
oral history collections generally, is a unique historical asset of national
importance. In recognition of the SOHP Collection's scholarly and cultural
value, SOHP founding director and renowned historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
received a 1999 National Humanities Medal. President Bill Clinton said
of Hall and her work at the SOHP, "Anyone who grew up in the South knows
that no book can capture the color and vibrancy you hear in the everyday
conversations on Main Street, in general stores, on the front porches
and the back yards. So all of us, whether we are from the South or not,
can say thank you, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, for capturing that unique and
wonderful voice, for recording history through the lives of ordinary people,
and, in so doing, for making history."
Since 1973, the Southern Oral History Program has recorded the voices
of the past. UNC faculty and students have interviewed subjects ranging
from mill workers and civil rights leaders to political figures and ethnic
immigrants. These interview tapes and transcripts capture the vivid personalities,
poignant personal stories, and behind-the-scenes decision-making that
bring history to life. The SOHP Collection engages such historical themes
as the industrial transformation of the Southern piedmont; civil rights;
women's history; Southern and state politics; environmental history; and
demographic change, among others. The SOHP Collection reflects social
history's animating spirit, a commitment to understanding history not
just from elite perspectives but also "from the bottom up." As the SOHP's
unofficial motto carefully notes, "You don't have to be famous for your
life to be history."
Made available to the public through the Southern Historical Collection
of Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the leading repository of manuscript
and other primary materials related to the history of the U.S. South,
the SOHP Collection has consistently proven one of the most heavily utilized
portions of this vast archive. Each year, the SOHP Collection attracts
research scholars, professors, K-12 educators, students, writers of historical
fiction, radio documentarians, and the general public to the campus. In
fiscal year 2003, visitors made some 522 requests for SOHP Collection
materials; in fiscal year 2004, this number reached 606 among 2,518 total
requests. As these figures suggest, oral history continues to gain momentum
both as an academic discipline, a pedagogical tool employed throughout
university and public school curricula, and as an arena of intense popular
interest.
The SOHP Collection has long supported path-breaking scholarship. Like
a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (UNC Press, 1987,
reissued 2000) stands as a landmark text in social history, labor history,
and the history of the American South. Authors Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James
Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly
relied on hundreds of interviews with working-class Southerners conducted
by the Southern Oral History Program to create what critics have hailed
as "a moving exploration of the transformation from rural farm to mill
village" and "social history at its best." Oral historian Studs Terkel
called Like a Family "a living, revelatory chronicle of life rarely
observed by the academe -- a powerhouse." Like a Family received
the 1988 Albert J. Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association,
the 1988 Philip Taft Labor History Award, and the 1988 Merle Curti History
Award in American Social History (co-winner).
Details on DocSouth and the University Library:
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) is a digital publishing initiative
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library that provides
Internet access to texts, images, and audio files related to Southern
history, literature, and culture from the colonial period through the
first decades of the 20th century. Currently DocSouth includes nine thematic
collections of books, diaries, posters, artifacts, letters, oral history
interviews, and songs. The collections are: "True
and Candid Compositions: The Lives and Writings of Antebellum Students
at the University of North Carolina;"
"First-Person Narratives of the American South;" "Library
of Southern Literature;" "North
American Slave Narratives;" "The
Southern Homefront, 1861-1865;" "The
Church in the Southern Black Community;" "The
North Carolina Experience, Beginnings to 1940;" and "North
Carolinians and the Great War."
DocSouth has received wide recognition for the important contribution
it makes to enhancing understanding of the American South among scholars,
students, and the general public. Since its establishment in 1996, DocSouth
has received more than $1.3 million in external grants from IMLS, the
National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress/Ameritech
National Digital Library Competition, the State Library of North Carolina
through its LSTA grant program, and private donations.
During 2005, the DocSouth web site registered more than 4 million sessions,
equivalent to more than 10 million pages viewed by DocSouth users.
The texts, images, and other materials come primarily from the premier
Southern collections in the libraries at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. These original Southern materials can be found in several
library locations, including the Southern
Historical Collection, one of the largest collections of Southern
manuscripts in the country; the North
Carolina Collection, the most complete printed documentation of a
single state anywhere; the Rare
Book Collection, which holds an extensive Southern pamphlet collection;
and Davis Library,
which offers rich holdings of printed materials on the Southeast. The
development of DocSouth is guided by an editorial board of faculty, publishing
experts, and librarians. Scholarly editors associated with each project
select individual titles and provide the contextual information that adds
value to digitized materials.
The University Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
is one of the leading research libraries in North America. Its holdings
include more than 5.6 million volumes, 21 million manuscript items, and
50,000 serial subscriptions.
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