Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson

Ryan Wilson is a third year student at the University of Guelph currently studying History and Geography in hopes to become a teacher! 

---

Reflection

It was a unique experience, and this was my first oral history project. Earlier in the semester our class talked about the factors that go into a good interview. It is better to treat the interview like a conversation, making eye contact and not interrupting the interviewee while their talking. In Ritchie’s Doing Oral History, Ritchie states “Oral historians often comment on the eagerness with which many older people agree to be interviews. The elderly seem to return to their youth while talking about it.”^[1] I could not agree more with this statement after the interview with Barbara. During the interview and the other times that I met with her I could tell that she genuinely loves talking about her family and reminiscing on memories which made the interview so much easier and made it a lot more fun. In this reflection I will be reflecting on what I learned about oral history, the interview process, transcribing the interview and what I would have done differently.

If I’m being honest when I was reading the course description, it did not seem like a oral history course so it was a surprise to me when I found out about this project. Nevertheless, I enjoyed learning about the use of oral history as I never knew anything about it. One thing that surprised me was all the legal issues surrounding oral history. I had no idea how complex it is to post an oral history as a simple “yes you can post this” is not good enough. In The Canadian Oral History Reader, one of the authors, Jill Tonus explains that “oral historians likely expend sufficient labour in preparing their questions and recording the resulting interviews to claim copyright in the underlying interview material, as well as any edited transcription derived from the recorded interview."^[2] I have found that oral history is good to use for giving a voice to under-represented communities as you get to hear the emotion in the interviewee’s voice making the interview a lot more interesting and worth hearing.

Before the actual interview we first sent a list of our interests to the Norfolk Manor so we could be paired with someone who has similar interests. Then we had to make a list of basic preliminary questions to ask our interviewee at the first meeting. These questions were asked to get to know our interviewee and find a possible topic to do research on and make it the primary direction of the interview. With my first meeting with Barbara, I found out that she has three kids, six grandchildren, six great grandchildren and one great-great granddaughter so I knew she was a very family centric person. I also found out that she has been to many places in the world so that is the direction I decided to this interview. It was not until after our first meeting with Barbara that I found out that she had written a book about her travels to India. This sparked my interest, but I had to wait till the actual interview to learn about it, so I did research on the empress of Britain which was the ship she came to Canada on. So, the big theme of the interview was her travels and how she ended up in Canada.

I have a new level of respect for oral historians after transcribing my interview. It was only a thirty-five-minute interview, but I think it took me six hours to fully transcribe so I can’t imagine the hours oral historians put in for interviews longer than mine. Transcribing was a tedious process of having to press rewind and pause every ten seconds. It was also very difficult to hear at times as the background noises got loud, and Barbara got quiet. I also realized how much I say the word “um” when I talk so I decided not to include filler words like that while transcribing. I also found side tracked conversations during the interview that literally had no contribution to the topic being discussed so I either took snippets of the conversation or did not include it. If there was one part of this project that I did not enjoy, it was definitely the transcribing but after I finished it, I felt so good because there were so many words and so much typing.

If I had the opportunity to do this project over or even another oral history project I would want to be better prepared for the interview. I felt like I did not have a lot of information to research especially since the book that Barbara wrote was un-published and made more for a family history. Maybe if I asked more specific questions instead of the basic questions during the first meeting, I would have had more information to do research on. Another thing I would have done differently is conduct the interview in a more private space as it was difficult to hear what Barbara was saying in the interview because of all the background noise. This is what made transcribing so hard because I had to have my volume all the way turned up and had to listen to it several times and a couple times, I literally could not translate what Barbara was saying because of how loud it was. 

Overall, I had a lot of fun doing this project even though it had me up late some nights. I honestly believe a huge success to my project was Barbara being enthused and happy to be part of the project! I learned a lot about conducting an oral history and the importance of oral history, especially in this day and age of technology. This was also my first small class, which I found to be nice because it made for great class conversations and this allowed Dr. Martin to give more attention to her students because there isn’t five hundred of us. Dr. Martin really helped break down this big project and made it fun to do!