EMOHA Oral History Event

Oral History in the East Midlands - Using Oral History

The East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA), at the Centre for Urban History in the University of Leicester, held a one day event about oral history on 12th June 2009. On a warm, sunny day 43 people turned up.

After a word from the Oral History Society's Cynthia Brown, EMOHA's Colin Hyde introduced the day and summarised what had happened as a result of the previous year's event, 'Promoting the Region', particularly the expansion of EMOHA's web pages looking at projects in the East Midlands - http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/emoha/emidlandsprojects.html

Dr Diane Davies of the University of Leicester then talked about her work looking at regional dialect and how she has used EMOHA's collections to create podcasts for her students. This was followed by Esther Simpson of ‘Watch This Space’ who passed round many wireless headphones which enabled everyone to hear an extract from an audio tour which had been created using oral histories. More information about the audio tours and presentations created by 'Watch This Space' can be found here - http://www.watch-this-space.org.uk/home.html . Heather Whitworth and Katherine Onion then talked about creating and using oral history recordings at Southwell Workhouse, Notts - http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/workhouse/

After lunch Jenny Labbon and George Watley gave a presentation about how the Northampton Black History Association has developed from its beginnings as a Lottery funded project. They also gave details about a new academic project 'The consumer behaviour of Caribbean settlers in Northamptonshire, c. 1955 - 1975', and the use of oral history in the project. Audio clips on their website can be found here - http://www.northants-black-history.org.uk/activitiesInterviews.asp . Then, Dr Viv Golding and Mai Onishi of the University of Leicester described the Japanese 'Genki' reminiscence project, which encouraged older people to create a healthy relationship between themselves and their local community. Viv and Mai's use of leaves to encourage people to reflect on their memories gave the room a distinctly autumnal feel.

Colin Hyde finished the day by outlining some of the issues around digitising older recordings and also gave examples of a variety of ways in which oral history has used.

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