Improving Access to Video Oral Histories

Michael Christel (Carnegie Mellon University)

This video explores video oral history projects. It uses the online archive The HistoryMakers to show what types of tools and resources exist to make similar types of projects as well as increasing their utility and accessibility. It discusses how to filter through large volumes of oral histories to find meaningful information for a project.

Further Reading and Resources

Oral History and Digital Humanities:

Voice, Access and Engagement, D. Boyd and M. Larson, eds.

Oral History Association annual meetings and ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) good sources for digital humanities/oral histories processing, e.g.:

Informedia digital video interface development and use with oral histories:

July 3, 2019. Digital History, Oral History, Digital Public History

Posted by

Michael Christel (Carnegie Mellon University)

Mike Christel has worked at Carnegie Mellon University over 32 years, the last 13 at the Entertainment Technology Center where he is now a Teaching Professor. His research spans multimedia information processing and interface research to transformational games for health and education. He has worked for over a decade with The HistoryMakers on data processing and interfaces into their significant 150,000 (and growing) African American video oral history stories, promoting general use and digital humanities scholarship.