Oral history with podcasts
Philip Wood
Introduction
My name is Phil Wood. I’m the Coordinator of the Woodbridge Online Access
Centre, Woodbridge in Southern Tasmania in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel just south
of Hobart. I’m responsible for the management of the Online Access Centre which
provides internet access and computer training to our local community.
The project that I’ve been engaged on is teaching some members of our community
who are part of an oral histories group how to produce oral histories using Web 2.0
technologies to get them up on the web as podcasts with images and accompanying
stories.
Our learners have initially started off with seven people from varying backgrounds
and varying ages, ranging from ages about, I think, our youngest is about 35 through
to our most senior student who is I think about 70 years old and generally from a
varied educational background: one a teacher (a retired teacher), a manager, a worker
in a call centre, so yes, a fairly diverse group of people.
The idea for the oral histories project came from an earlier event when we
commemorated the 1967 bushfires that occurred here in Southern Tasmania and there
was a need identified then for us to maybe get out and start recording some oral
histories of people within our community. So it became obvious to me that we could
produce a CD or we could produce something that maybe we could lend ourselves to
the new technologies, particularly the Web 2.0 technologies with wiki spaces and
podcasts and that. So as a way of a more broader approach throughout our state of
introducing our communities to these new and emerging technologies the podcast was
seen as a way of maybe engaging our community in using these new technologies and
as it’s turned out they have embraced them and we hope to continue it from here, not
only through our senior students, adult learners here at the Online Access Centre but
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also we have a partnership with our local district school. So we’re going to take the
concept down there and also engage the students down there in the idea of podcasts.
In terms of the actual project itself, it wasn’t a formal structured course; it was in
many ways an informal skill transfer and learning process for the participants in my
project, students if you would call them that, mature age students, that chose freely to
come along and participate in this particular project and I suppose some of the skills
and strengths that they were going to gain from this was a confidence in going out and
being able to put people at ease, record these people’s memories using the technology
such as iPods, etc, and the idea of introducing the people to how easy it is to actually
edit the audio. I think that was one of the interesting points in this process, that they
were in the first—for some of them, the first time they’d ever looked at a wave editor
and having shown them just a couple of techniques of editing quickly picked up on it
so I was pleasantly surprised and I know they were to realise how actually easy it was
to actually edit audio. So some of the skills that they’ve picked up through this project
are particularly in the area of creating the audio itself, while peripherals like
photography and scanning of images and colour correction and using the wiki space, I
suppose, one of the primary outcomes of this particular project was this whole idea of
audio production.
Recording the oral history of the community
So, insofar as the participants in this particular project were concerned, none of them
have actually conducted interviews before so what we did in our learning sessions was
just to talk about some of the techniques that we might employ insofar as obtaining a
good story. Some of those little tips and techniques are one, of course, to make your
interviewee as comfortable as possible and try and help them to get there’s actually a
microphone there. Be well researched about the person you’re going to interview so
as at least you’ve got an idea of where storylines can go. So if you remember from a
previous discussion or a chat with them particular issues or particular topics or
memories that they’ve had that you know would make a great recording, try and lead
the conversation down that path. Leave lots of nice pauses for ease of editing and ask
questions that take the story somewhere as well, so don’t ask questions that are going
to elicit a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer but certainly questions like, ‘Tell us about the time that
—‘ or, ‘What are your memories of—?’ and those sorts of techniques.
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We’ve also tried where possible to keep the stories short and sharp, little vignettes, if
you like, so obviously a beginning, a middle and an end, and what we’ve found is that
stories of around about three minutes are a good way of putting together the vignettes
to form a whole story of this person’s memories or their lives, and it engages the
listener probably that much easier, much more easily in terms of gaining their
attention and keeping that attention. If you try and go beyond that time, sometimes
they can drift off, so I think some attention needs to be taken insofar as how questions
are posed, how the answers are done and how it’s edited out at the end.
Our project centred around oral histories from around the Channel region here in
Southern Tasmania and we’re in the process now of finalising three more. We’ve got
one up on the web so far with another one to go up next week and another one the
following week.
The first story up is just an interview with a farmer who is now retired from the
region, about his early memories of going to school, being raised on the farm, the
work that they did with their dad and when they first bought the house, some of the
stories there, some interesting little tales that he can tell about hiding from his mum
when it was milking time and some rather amusing stories there. Another story we’ve
recorded and in the process of just editing now is from what we could call a ‘10 pound
Pom’ that emigrated from the UK in the 1960s to take up farming down here in our
region, so some of Mary’s earlier memories of her time here and getting used to the
place after the, after having lived in England.
And we’re also talking to a 93-year-old lady who has a very strong connection with
the orcharding industry which was very prevalent in this region of Tasmania and some
of her memories are absolutely enthralling in terms of some of the early days of fruit
picking and the use of steam ships for picking up the apples from the local region and
transport and distances and schools and such, so some fascinating stories to be told
with some of these people.
We’ve got a few more people lined up, too; for example, we’re just about to start an
interview with a fire chief who was responsible for the fire supervision here in
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Southern Tasmania in 1967 with our bad bushfires. So some great stories to be told in
coming months.
The process that we adopted insofar as recording these oral histories was, one, as a
group deciding who would be likely candidates, discussing who might represent a
particular spectrum within our society because we want to try and cover as many
particular memories, if you like, for posterity purposes, of deciding on a number of
participants. In the case of Barbara, one of our participants, she’d actually purchased a
property from this gentleman and he’d since retired, so he was a likely candidate and
he was more than willing to be a participant. So it was a case of taking the recorder
out to his house with his wife, sitting down and just going through several stories and
recording them, little breaks and a cup of tea in between, put them at ease, and allow
them to come forth with their stories.
From doing that, we bring them back to our Online Access Centre here where they’re
downloaded on to the computer and then we set about the process, using Audacity, a
free sound editing or audio editing program, to then go through, cut out any erroneous
pieces and errors and ‘debreath’ it in terms of breaths and mistakes and pauses and
such, tidy up the sound a bit, maybe increase the volume a bit, and then export that
particular wave file out as an MP3, getting it down to a reasonable size, and quality. I
think we settled on around about 128kB per second as a quality that provided us with
a reasonable size MP3 file for broadcast.
From there, we loaded those podcasts, or sorry the various MP3 recordings, up on to a
product, on to a platform known as Podbean, which is a podcast hosting website
where you can receive free podcast hosting for up to I think 100mb of space and from
there there’s an incremental price to pay for increased space and traffic after that, so
placing the podcast up on Podbean we then just simply just used the embed code that
was available on Podbean to embed an MP3 player interface into our wiki space
where we’ve started, where we’ve created the online histories website on a wiki
space, and from there we inserted a few photos that were taken of the participants, as
well as some of the photos taken from their archives that we’ve scanned, and posted
that up on the wiki space with an introduction with the embedded MP3 player playing
the podcast on demand via the Podbean site.
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That is the end aim, is to listen to each—because there’s been separate different
members of this group interviewing different people—so a chance for them to interact
in terms of listening to each other’s podcasts, rating them, commenting on them, so
that’s a future thing in the next, over the next three or four weeks, so I’m certainly
looking forward to that insofar as the outcomes and the evaluation and getting some
feedback from the participants as to the end products.
I think it’s important in situations like this to play to the skills of the students or the
participants and we’ve certainly identified in our group those that were interested in
certain components of the project, because it is easy to become disengaged or wander
off, as you say, so insofar as the participants in this particular course, so had indicated
an interest in the actual editing, audio editing; others were interested in the
photography and the touching up of images or the preparation of images; and we had
another two people that were more interested in the idea of the actually wiki space
itself and creating that and working on that, which they are at this point in time as we
try to improve on it and build on the website. So I think it’s about engaging them with
particular facets of a project that you know they’re going to keep their interest; but
also to expose them to the other areas of the project as well, so they do get an
overview of the total process, but I think it’s about engaging and playing to strengths.
My role in this project has been as a coordinator and a teacher, drawing on my depth
of knowledge in this field from public broadcasting and my private work as a web and
film developer, and yes, so essentially I’m acting as a mediator or a facilitator of this
process to allow them to bounce ideas off me, to be there to troubleshoot when they
have got a problem, and also to assist them with the technologies.
We haven’t had to deal with any issues of inappropriate content or use of language or
any of those sorts of issues that I suppose comes down to the nature of the interviewee
and the interviewer but we haven’t had to cross that bridge so in that sense it’s been
trouble free.
The debrief is essentially done when we do the editing process together and normally
that’s one-on-one with myself and the person or the two people that have conducted
the interview, but as we actually go through and listen to the recording we can pick up
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and use some cut and shut techniques to fit stories together, to smooth them out, but
also on a couple of occasions we’ve identified where maybe we could have got
another story to finish a story that had started but hadn’t finished off so we had the
opportunity on at least two occasions to go back and visit this person again and extend
on one of the stories. So that was a good process in itself, being able to listen to the
recorded audio in the editing phase and discuss the outcomes there, but also to
identify other material.
Primarily from the people that have been involved in this and given their age and
they’re relatively newcomers to this technology in terms of producing it, as opposed
to listening to it, has been the absolute ease of use and that’s probably where they
were a bit tentative at first, thinking, ‘Well, this is all new technology to me and this is
going to be a little bit maybe beyond me’ but I think it was the case that once having
seen how easy the recording equipment was to use and how easy it was to edit and
then simply export it as an MP3, it was the case of the comments that I’ve received
back, in fact, how non-confrontational was the process and how easy to use were both
the recording hardware and the editing software.
In the process of evaluating this whole project, and I speak of it as a state-wide project
where a number of people around Tasmania have engaged in a project which is either
similar to this one or has a similar use of Web 2.0 technologies, we’re getting together
in the next couple of weeks to discuss how those projects have turned out, what the
results have been, how the participants enjoyed that process and what they’ve learned
from that, and how we can take it to the next step, and then as I said in our case we’re
taking it to another step with our school; but insofar as our own evaluation of the
project, we’re going to meet again as a group early next week. As I say, this project’s
just in its final stages now—just to look at some of the techniques we used, how they
came out, listen again to the other two recordings that we’ve got ready to edit, and
then trialling it as well with some other participants and members of our Online
Access Centre here, for them to sit down with a computer, with a set of headphones
on, and to listen through to the podcasts and give their feedback and then from there
we’ll just invite a wider group of people to have a listen and see what they think,
provide some feedback, and then we can use that then to improve on what we’ve done
so far and improve on some of our techniques.
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Be prepared insofar as your recording equipment to make sure you’ve got good
quality recording equipment and, as I’ve said, we’ve used digital voice note takers and
while they’re adequate I think you probably need to look at something a little bit
better quality in terms of audio quality, and as I’ve said, we’ve settled on the iPod for
several hundred dollars including the microphone attachment. It’s actually quite a
worthwhile device to use.
Certainly, insofar as an oral histories project was concerned, picking your
interviewees and being pretty well prepared when you do go in to do the final
interview so you can actually drive the story in a particular direction and make sure
that you stay on track and not be led off on little angles which is easy to do in this
process, but I think the preparation, having the right equipment, and certainly
encouraging people to put the interviewees at ease in the process certainly results in a
better product.
Using podcasts both as a educational experience in itself and as a teaching tool, it
does come down to content and how that content’s put together and we’ve already
spoken about the issue of inappropriate content and such things like that. So it’s
certainly important to be able to target the content, what that content is going to be,
and how it’s going to engage the listener—so some of those issues are paramount in
setting out to start the podcasting process about what is the podcast going to take in,
what perspective is it going to be taken from, how as a teacher are you going to
engage the students to keep their interest in a podcast and I suppose draw those
boundaries around the content to, while not make it boring and not very exciting for
them, but to also put those boundaries around those particular content productions so
they’re within the realms of acceptability.
Some technical issues with podcasts
The tools that we employed for this podcast and wiki space project, well, it was a bit
hit and miss at first, I must admit, and there is a tip out there for people to make sure
that you do research the equipment that you purchase to carry out projects like this.
We did purchase some—initially—purchased a Sony ICD-U60 MP3 Digital Voice
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Recorder and while that was adequate what we found was the sound quality wasn’t
quite up to what would make a good podcast, even though you could edit it and clean
up the sound a bit, we just weren’t that happy. So eventually we did settle on using a
fairly mainstream product in an iPod with a recording attachment, and we found that
produced excellent sound quality, ease of use and ease of transfer from the actual iPod
itself into the computer, and from there, in terms of the MP3s themselves, coming out
as wave files we’d just use a simple little product called Audacity, which is a free
download product, that we could then produce and export the MP3s from. And then
from there, insofar as the podcast, we use a service called Podbean which is a free
podcasting hosting service and we embed our MP3 podcast into that site and then
through our wiki space we actually embed the link back to Podbean to play those
podcasts to accompany the oral history presentations.
Insofar as the technology of podcasting, I’m relatively familiar with it having been a
podcast user for many years now, since its inception basically, but insofar as
introducing that sort of technology, insofar as the production side of a podcast is
concerned within our community, there was a learning curve, there was no doubt
about that.
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