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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.