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Queering Oral History - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Narrator: Melora Creager; Themes: LGBTG/drag, race/racism, music and art https://www.libraryofvoiceandsound.org/oral-histories/melora-creager-2014-06-19
        
        Narrator: Charlie Ferrusi; Themes: LGBTQ acceptance and safety, politics, gentrification and poverty https://www.libraryofvoiceandsound.org/oral-histories/charlie-ferrusi-2019-06-16
- - - - “I think in most people’s minds, history is still about the important people, the people that made headlines, people with privilege and money and power in a formal sense.” (D'Emilio) — part of building this archive required convincing individuals that their materials are worth preserving
      - Discovering more queer history will help us in future decades construct what happened in the past. All archive materials are part of a community and a movement’s history.
  - - - download original transcripts from the ACT UP Oral History project here: https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/31/archival_objects/1768378
- - - - Duazo said the project originally started “to get a sense of us as a community… not just what the mainstream media would have us be, but reflect back to the community all that we could be and all that we are, to show all the diversity” - to broadness of the queer Asian experience.
        
        COMMUNITY AND VISIBILITY
      - “Knowing there are more of us [queer people] in the universe makes me feel like we exist in the here and now.” - host of Periodically Queer, Umi Hsu
- - - - Phase 2: Archiving and Coding — drafting transcripts and interview summaries, seeking consent and approval from narrators on the content of their donations, generating closed captions for the interview access copies, and logging metadata for all files
        
        Phase 3: Research Outcomes — A desire to connect broader publics with this rich archive of oral testimony inspired us to experiment with digital research creation in the form of audio portraits, animated video shorts, and other new media methods.
        
        For Krü Maekdo, who founded the Black Lesbian Archives, a digital and traveling archival project after struggling to find information about Black lesbian history online, queer archives can be an important tool for self-discovery. “When you don’t have a semblance of where you’ve been, it’s hard to presently connect to who you are,” she says. “Those physical and digital archives and oral stories that we tell each other bring us and bridge us together. Some of those experiences that our elders might have gone through, you can relate to those stories, even if they’re not your exact origin story.”
- - - - Value in felt experience
        
        Problems and contradictions are what make the work meaningful
        
        Open-ended questions
    - - Ask the narrator to analyze their own experience; listen to them and don't anticipate or your next question. Sometimes an invitation to keep sharing is all the narrator needs: simply, "can you say more about that?" can go a long way.
  - - - Facilitators should consider insider/outsider relationship and ask themselves if they are the right person to conduct this interview.