Doing Oral History

Students explore exemplary historical works based on oral histories and develop a range of practical skills while completing their own interviews. Topics include oral history and narrative theory, interview techniques, transcript preparation, and digital archiving. Students also learn how to analyze interviews using both qualitative and quantitative methods, practice writing history using oral evidence, and experiment with digital humanities approaches for disseminating oral history, including the Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project. This course forms part of the "Doing History" series: rigorous undergraduate colloquia that introduce the practice of history within a particular field or thematic area.