Analysing Oral Histories: Social Roles and Narrative Self-Regulation in Holocaust Survivors' Testimonies
Abstract
The oral history (OH) interview is a generally accepted method of obtaining verbal accounts of past events from eyewitnesses. Contemporary OH draws from several scientific disciplines and considers various philosophical and methodological issues.
The original approach to OH as the "transparent" locus of information is no longer accepted, and researchers acknowledge that the interview unfolds in a specific time and place, and between particular people. Inevitably, OH interview is a speech exchange nested in situational and interactional context, with participants attempting (among other things) to collaboratively produce a comprehensible account of the past.
One of the goals of the interview is to elicit storytelling, often for an imagined audience.Recordings of this specific type of interaction can be subjected to different kinds of analysis. The data in this exemplar are drawn from USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, which contains more than 53,000 video-recorded interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, and other genocides.
The dataset is provided by Jakub Mlynář from the Faculty of Arts at the Charles University in Prague, and shows how it is possible to carry out secondary micro-sociological analysis of such data with two analytical aims: (i) the role as an interactional resource; and (ii) narrative self-regulation. Social roles are used as an interactional resource during OH interview in negotiating the important attributes of the interviewer's and interviewee's performance in the context of the situation.
The dataset will be of most use to those who are interested in analysing the co-production of an interview, much less the actual content of the interview.