My primary interest in attending THAT camp is learning more about Omeka and digital archiving in general, so I add my voice to the prior posts.
I am also interested in research methodologies surrounding digital archives. At a conference last weekend, I heard several presentations featuring research in which transcribed histories, blogs, and other digital repositories served as source material for rhetorical analysis. As my research this semester involves collecting oral histories, I wondered about the parameters and ethics surrounding these practices, and how often this kind of research is used. If anyone attending the conference this weekend has experience with this kind of research, I would be most interested in hearing their perspectives on the subject.
About Marcy Galbreath
I am a native Floridian, hailing from the small farming community of Samsula, Florida. I received my PhD in Texts and Technology from the University of Central Florida in 2014. I hold an M.A. in English, Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies from UCF (2010), and BAs in English and Fine Art from Flagler College, St. Augustine (1993). My research interests include rhetoric in science and nature writing, communication of human-nature relationships in agricultural and environmental issues, and environmental and science communication in digital media contexts. As part of my dissertation project, I created a community history archive, the Samsula Historical Archive Community Project (samsulahistory.net) as a way of exploring some of these ideas. I currently teach Composition II and Writing about Science & Technology at UCF.
This is interesting. I’d love to think about what using digital archives (hyperlinked footnotes) does in shaping a scholarly argument.
Most of the ethics are on what the person thought the oral history would be used for at the time the oral history was recorded. I think this is mostly straight ethics (ie. not legal or something that will be enforced by anything other than culture after the narrator has died).