The Peculiarities of Oral History*

Portelli, Alessandro

doi:10.1093/hwj/12.1.96

Cited by 275 publications

(92 citation statements)

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“…Oral histories are not intended to provide a replacement for stories of global climate change or stories of policy and technological innovation. Oral history is a means of providing subjective, personal narratives as a complement to other histories and to other sources that deal with 'facts' (Portelli 1981). Oral histories provide a rich data source that enables reconstructions of personal and local impact to rise to the foreground, so allowing for individual idiosyncrasy and social diversity.…”

Section: Why Storytelling As Oral History?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Storytelling as oral history: Revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Goodchild

Ambrose

Maye-Banbury

2017

Energy Research & Social Science

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Oral history provides a means of understanding heating behaviour through encouraging respondents to articulate the past in terms of stories. Unlike other qualitative methods, oral history foregrounds the ontology of personal experiences in a way that is well suited to revealing previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the home. Three types of change may be distinguished: long term historical change, change associated with the life-cycle stage of the individual and sudden change. A sample of eight in-depth interviews is used to demonstrate the potential of oral history in the study of home heating. The themes to emerge from the interviews include early memories of the home, the financial struggle to heat the home, the influence of childhood experiences in adulthood and the association between warmth and comfort. For the future, domestic comfort, energy conservation and carbon reduction need to be reconciled with one another. Finally, a third type -and this is the interest here -comprises the personal stories of individuals that may be collected to create oral history.The aim is to provide a 'proof of concept' of oral history in energy research, that is to say a demonstration of its feasibility, validity and usefulness. The aim is, therefore, not just to demonstrate the methodology, but to show how oral history can be used to illuminate issues. Other researchers are, at present, using oral storytelling methods to illustrate and engage the public in histories of the use and exploitation of energy by local communities in the UK.1 'Coal fires, steel houses and the man in the moon', byDarby (2017), published in this same special edition, has a similar theme in revealing the story of a local experiences of energy transition. In addition, public engagement is a theme in large-scale storytelling exercises undertaken by the mass media, for example by the US National Public Radio 2 and the British Broadcasting Corporation.3 However, searches undertaken by the paper's authors have not identified any comparable study, in the UK or elsewhere, using storytelling and specifically the methods of oral history to investigate heating as an aspect of the history of the home.The paper is divided into three main sections:First: an explanation of the advantages and distinctiveness of oral history;Secondly, a review of the themes that might be expected to arise in the stories of respondents; andFinally an analysis of the accounts given by eight respondents. Why storytelling as oral history?Oral history is an extension of various qualitative and survey research methods that seek to capture previously undocumented phenomena in the private world of the house and home-a world that technologists, designers and energy researchers can struggle to access (Stevenson and Leaman, 2010

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Section: Why Storytelling As Oral History?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Storytelling as oral history: Revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Goodchild

Ambrose

Maye-Banbury

2017

Energy Research & Social Science

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“…Alessandro Portelli has observed that interviewees will often give the interviewer the expected answer, especially if the question is leading. 46 Listening to Robinson's interview it is apparent that she was confused by the question "were you patriotic?" Of course she was and while there is no clear articulation of her patriotism as experienced during the war, she reminds us that World War I, however it is judged today, remains part of Britain's military heritage and illustrates the difficulty of separating memory from history.…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women’s Land Army in World War I Britain

White¹

2012

jcha

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This paper explores the methodological challenges posed by interviews with former members of the Women’s Land Army held in Britain’s Imperial War Museum. These interviews were conducted approximately 60 years after the First World War as part of the Women’s War Work Collection that was created in an effort to capture the role of women in the wars of the twentieth century. These documents are certainly of value to the historian, although the decades that passed between event and recollection highlight the problematic relationship between history and memory. The author argues that due to this temporal gap and the continuation of lived experience that shaped both identity and memory in the intervening years, the interviews lose their evidentiary primacy and must be approached as secondary sources, albeit ones grounded in personal experience. This challenge is exacerbated by problems with the interview process itself that guided how the Land Girls’ narratives were reconstructed by the interviewees. This paper works toward a re-evaluation of the usefulness of these oral interviews.

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“…Portelli (1981) argumenta que as fantasias, e mesmo os casos de transferência que aparecem nas estórias, são importantes para a memória das pessoas. Deste modo, os fatos dos quais as pessoas se lembram ou se esquecem seriam a substância da qual é feita a história.…”

Section: Quanto Ao Nosso Mundo Cotidiano Parece Estar Escrito Mais Nunclassified

“…Consequentemente, não há fonte oral falsa. Portelli (1981) salienta, ainda, que a diferença da fonte oral encontra-se no fato de que os depoimentos não verdadeiros são psicologicamente verdadeiros, e que esses "erros", às vezes, revelam mais dados que o relato exato. A credibilidade da fonte oral, portanto, não deve ser avaliada por aquilo que o testemunho oral pode frequentemente esconder, por sua inexatidão para com os fatos, mas pela divergência deles, onde imaginação e simbolismo estão presentes.…”

Section: Quanto Ao Nosso Mundo Cotidiano Parece Estar Escrito Mais Nunclassified

A história oral na análise organizacional: a possível e promissora conversa entre a história e a administração

Gomes

Santana

2010

Cad. EBAPE.BR

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ResumoNos últimos anos tem se verificado um aumento do número de publicações em estudos organizacionais que adotam metodologias mais qualitativas que quantitativas. Este crescimento justifica-se pelo fato de os pesquisadores da área considerarem mais incisivamente o caráter multidisciplinar da administração como uma ciência social aplicada, que se utiliza de diversas fontes epistemológicas. Entretanto, os teóricos da Administração sempre relegaram, ou nunca consideraram, o potencial da História para a análise organizacional. Neste trabalho, propõe-se sensibilizar pesquisadores da área de Administração a respeito da potencialidade do diálogo entre a História e a Administração para a análise da realidade organizacional, bem como enfatizar a importância do desenvolvimento de estudos locais e regionais contemplando as vozes do "passado" e dos "esquecidos". Tendo em vista que as organizações somente serão satisfatoriamente compreendidas a partir do momento em que sua história é conhecida, apresentaremos, brevemente, neste artigo, a experiência da Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia. Palavras-chave:Administração; análise organizacional; História; História Oral; pesquisa qualitativa. AbstractIn the last years the number of publications in organizational studies which adopt rather qualitative than quantitative methodologies has increased. This can be explained by the fact that researchers have been taking in account the multidisciplinary characteristics of business administration as an applied social science that makes use of several epistemological sources. However, scholars always relegated or never considered the potential of history studies for the analysis of organizations. The proposal of this work is not only to catch the researchers' eyes to the potentiality of the dialogue between history and administration as a tool to analyze the organizational reality, but emphasize the importance of the development of local and regional studies taking in account the voices from the "past" and of "forgotten people". Starting from the point of view that the organizations will only be understood satisfactorily when they know their own history, this article will present in brief the experience of the Universidade Estadual do Sudoeste da Bahia.

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The Peculiarities of Oral History*

Cited by 275 publications

References 0 publications

Storytelling as oral history: Revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Storytelling as oral history: Revealing the changing experience of home heating in England

Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women’s Land Army in World War I Britain

A história oral na análise organizacional: a possível e promissora conversa entre a história e a administração

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