According to the Oral History Association, “Oral history is a field of study and a method of gathering, preserving and interpreting the voices and memories of people, communities, and participants in past events.” Oral history is about memory and lived experiences. It is about listening and being heard.

Four key elements of oral history work are preparation, interviewing, preservation, and access. Oral historians should give careful consideration to each at the start of any oral history project, regardless of whether it is comprised of one or many interviews.

Oral history enables people to share their stories in their own words, with their own voices, through their own understanding of what hap- pened and why. With careful attention to preserving our sound recordings, the voices of our narrators will endure to speak for them when they are gone.

Primary sources include documents or artifacts created by a witness to or participant in an event. Primary sources may include diaries, letters, interviews, oral histories, photographs, newspaper articles, government documents, poems, novels, plays, and music.

Sequence for Oral History Research

1. Formulate a central question or issue.
2. Plan the project.
3. Conduct background research.
4. Interview.
5. Process interviews.
6. Evaluate research and interviews and cycle back to.
7. Organize and present results.
8. Store materials archivally.

Alessandro Portelli identifies six elements that mark out oral history as intrinsically different or peculiar from other historical sources. These are orality, narrative, subjectivity, credibility, objectivity and authorship. To these might be added performativity, mutability and collaboration.

Oral history is often one person’s point of view, unless someone gathers a series of interviews on the same issue together in a volume. A traditional written history, by contrast, uses a variety of sources, which may include oral interviews, government reports, newspaper articles, letters, diaries and personal papers.

Oral history is fundamentally different from that of oral tradition; oral tradition is a way of transmitting general cultural issues from one generation to another. Oral history, as used currently, refers to the act of collecting evidence and documents, through various scientific methods, mainly active interviewing.

ORAL HISTORY (noun) definition and synonyms | Macmillan Dictionary.

Autonomy is a term used to describe a person’s or government’s ability to make decisions, or speak and act on their own behalf, without interference from another party. Although it is used in many different contexts, autonomy is most often an important element of political, philosophical, and medical conversations.

To summarize: oral history might be understood as a self-conscious, disciplined conversation between two people about some aspect of the past considered by them to be of historical significance and intentionally recorded for the record.

The Oral History Association offers several resources for you to learn about all facets of oral history. OHA also offers a series of publications on community oral history, family oral history, oral history and the law, and other subjects.

In these cases, personal autonomy is required in order to sign informed consent forms or more serious forms, like a DNR, which means do not resuscitate and is a form signed by patients that prevents doctors from using life support or machines to assist with breathing in the event that their heart stops or they no longer have brain function.