Notes from the Field: Digital History and Oral History

Abstract

Since the 1980s, technological changes—often collectively referred to as a technological revolution—have played an important part in the shaping and reshaping of traditional historical practices, expanding our capabilities to reach potentially vast audiences and to create innovative compositional works that meld visual, aural, and textual narratives into digital forms that can engage both scholars and the general public in discourse. The technological revolution has transformed how we collect, preserve, and disseminate historical knowledge. It has had an especially strong impact on oral history and on my own work as an oral, labor and business, and public historian.