Intro: Telling someone else’s story is a lot of responsibility. After collecting narratives, oral historians often have to decide how to make that story accessible to the public. In Dr. Tim Raphael’s recent workshop talk, he called this process “activating the archive.” In this post, current OHMA student, Lauren Instenes, will discuss the complexities of this process by taking you on the journey of a story she previously attempted to “activate.”
There are many different ways to tell a story and this is becoming increasingly true in our current age of technological advancement. I happened to grow up in the world of theater with parents who both told stories for a living. To me, live performance has always been a powerful form of storytelling. But we also have the world of video: movies, news and tv shows, even YouTube videos which are consumed by a massive audience every day. Then there is the classic written word. Hundreds of genres of books, newspaper articles, blogs posts and even social media are ways to share a story with the world. Lastly, the form oral historians are most familiar with, audio. We not only have recorded interviews, but podcasts have become increasingly popular and audio books have started to take on a life of their own.
Before starting to study oral history I hadn’t given much thought to the pros and cons of different storytelling forms, but a recent talk given by Dr. Tim Raphael of Rutgers University Newark has left me thinking about storytelling in a whole new way. The Newest Americans project, run by Dr. Raphael out of Rutgers Center for Migration and the Global City, uses everything from annotated digital maps and spoken word poetry to graphic novels and glass books to tell their stories. “Activating the archive” is the phrase that Raphael uses to describe how his team uses archived oral histories and newly collected stories in different formats to reach diverse audiences. The type of media used for a project, he says, is mostly determined by the goal of the project and the desired audience. Yet, what does it mean, for us as oral historians, to take someone’s story and use it in these different ways? How much of the narrator’s voice are we losing when we try to make their story accessible to the world? Can we limit that loss in some way?
In this post, I would like to delve into these questions by showing how a single story can be used in a variety of formats. This is a story of a friend of mine named Winkie. I collected her interview as part of a project called Facing Intolerance in Springfield Ohio, which was done through the organization The Facing Project. When stories are collected for a Facing Project, a writer meets with a narrator to record an interview. That writer then uses that interview to create a written first-person narrative. In our project, these written stories were used to create a book and a play. I would like to take you on the journey of this story as it traveled through different mediums so we can discuss what it gained and lost along the way.
Below is a recording of Winkie, telling the story of her experience attending the National Softball Championship in Chattanooga, Tennessee in her own words.
Black and white photograph of Winkie. The picture is of her profile and she is wearing a close-fitting patterned hat and dangling earrings.
Just a plain audio recording has many faults. Firstly, it doesn’t allow you to see the narrator, their facial expressions or their body language. By including the photo above, I allowed you to imagine Winkie in your mind, but it is not the same as seeing and connecting with the real person. For this reason, we rarely see an audio file by itself being shared broadly on social media. On the other hand, you get to listen to the actual narrator. You get to hear how she speaks, how she laughs, the precision to which she picks her words, and the way she takes a breath before talking about a difficult topic. Below you will find a transcript of this same excerpt. You miss a lot of these nuances without the audio.
Oral historians discuss at length the benefits and failings of a transcript. In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, Alessandro Portelli says “The transcript turns aural objects into visual ones, which inevitably implies changes and interpretation.”[1] He goes on to discuss all of the things one must change, standardize, and leave out to create a readable transcript. While a transcript does not accurately represent the dialogue of an interview, it does allow us to easily store and maintain the interview as well as give it a new kind of accessibility. When a transcript is created, the story can be used in research and other forms of writing. Below you will find a first-person narrative written by Maria Symons based on Winkie’s original story.
This version, while being more structured has the downfall of losing Winkie’s voice. We are no longer hearing Winkie describe herself on her own terms, but instead how someone else has interpreted her story. However, this excerpt is from a 1,000 word short story, that was included in a small book and dispersed throughout the community. The condensing of this story made it more digestible and accessible to the public. It was also much easier to stage in a live performance. Below you will find a short clip of the production of these stories that was put together for the community. In the audience were the narrators, including Winkie, her grandson and many friends, and while the video quality is horrible, you can get a sense of what it was like to hear these stories performed.
Now we are not listening to Winkie’s voice nor hearing her own words. Instead we are watching a completely different person play her onstage. How much of the story that is being told now actually represents Winkie? This version has the bones of Winkie’s story, but everything else has been replaced by something new. This was a difficult revelation for me, as someone who was raised by a family of theater professionals and never really thought about the ethics of portraying the experience of others on stage in this way. Not everything about dramatizing a story is bad. Through this medium, an audience can now be bombarded with the loud hateful yelling that Winkie is recalling, and they can listen to the encouraging words of her father, imagining how it might have felt to be in that stadium. This play is something that can be performed multiple times, for many different audiences. Narrators can bring their friends and families and take pride in the fact that their story is touching the lives of others. In addition, the full PDF of the book and the video of the performance are available online. The Facing Project uses quotes from the stories on social media, like the opening line of Winkie’s story below, to raise awareness for different issues. They also now have an NPR podcast in which audiences listen to a dramatic reading of the story and the hosts discuss related important topics.
Using multimedia to tell a story provides you with the opportunity to capture the world’s attention, make the story relatable and easily accessible to people who may benefit from hearing it. Dr. Raphael talks about the archive as a chamber where stories die because they may never be heard by anyone besides researchers. “Activating the archive” means that Winkie’s story will be read and seen by hundreds of people in Springfield, but, in this case, that came with some costs. The beauty of multimedia and advancing technology is that there are exciting new ways to make stories accessible to a large audience without losing too much of the narrator. For me, the important thing is that Winkie is happy with how her story is being portrayed. I think the most important thing, for us as oral historians, is to create projects that make the narrators proud. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this could be to include narrators in the decision about how their stories will be presented, but no matter how we do it or what form of media we use to get there, we should never lose site of where we started – with a person who is willing to share their story. For this reason, I want to end this story’s journey by bringing us full circle, back to the purest version of it I am able to provide you, Winkie’s voice.
Lauren Instenes is a queer activist and storyteller who is a current OHMA student. In the past, Lauren has used her passion for theater and community service to further LGBTQ movements through storytelling. This year, Lauren is exploring how oral histories can be used in different medias to empower communities, raise awareness and create change.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.