Oral History Podcasting
Back in April, Bright Archives hosted a workshop at the Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) annual conference. It was called: Storifying Oral History Through Podcasting: A Practical Skills Workshop.
Dave and I revisited some of our old oral history podcast work and offered a step by step workflow for producing podcasts centered around oral history, including how to choose equipment, get started with audio editing and engineering, and write a script. We also provided live audio editing demos.
What is an Oral History Podcast?
We started the workshop with some definitions. There are quite a few conflicting definitions of “oral history podcast” out there so we offered the one we use most often: An oral history podcast is one that uses true oral histories. These interviews are conducted using oral history best practices and the interviews are available in a form outside of the podcast, such as in an archive or a publication.
4 Steps for Oral History Podcasting
We also shared the 4 basic steps we recommend for producing an oral history podcast:
Step 1) Planning: Create plans to develop, fund, produce, distribute, and market your oral history podcast.
Step 2) Scripting: Use storytelling strategies, narration, and guest interviews to build a story structure around the oral histories.
Step 3) Production: Record interviews and host voice acting, create or acquire music and sounds, and put it all together.
Step 4) Distribution: Publish your podcast and tell the world about it.
Challenges of Oral History Podcasting
During the workshop, attendees told us about many of the challenges they’re facing in their podcasting projects, primarily factors such as finite resources and limited audio engineering experience. And the discussion got us thinking, why is oral history podcasting so challenging? Is it just lack of resources and needed training? Over the next few days, we continued the conversation and came up with a number of additional reasons, including copyrights, sound sourcing, and marketing and design, and we thought two of these reasons were especially worth noting.
Reason 1) Audio Quality: Often, we’re dealing with “found audio” or audio that we did not record ourselves, so we cannot ask the questions that will help us tell a compelling and cohesive story for a podcast. Sometimes the audio is low quality. Sometimes the interviewer didn’t ask the right questions for the story we’re looking to tell. Sometimes the interviewee did not provide enough “visuals” in their stories. Sometimes the interview just doesn’t flow. Whatever the reason, we cannot control the audio quality of these interviews and as a result it takes much longer to review and edit the recordings into a podcast format.
Reason 2) Length and Breadth: We’re often working with life-history-style interviews that cover a broad range of topics across a person’s life rather than a topical interview that covers one event or area in a person’s life in depth. The conversations are long and sometimes meandering, following the direction of the narrator’s thoughts. This means that the podcast team needs to work much harder through narration to set up the story, provide missing information, and guide the listener through the episode. This may also involve conducting interviews with numerous experts who can provide context and additional information.
For these reasons, oral historians face unique challenges when producing podcasts. It takes a long time and a considerable amount of effort, much more than it might seem on the surface.
Future Projects
After we finished work on our old podcast Cut Pathways in 2023, Dave and I took a break from oral history podcasting for a while and decided to launch Why We Collect, which centers conversations with a single guest each month. But after this workshop, we began talking about topics for future oral history podcasts. Who knows, in the next few months or years, you may see an oral history podcast from Bright Archives. If you have a topic you would like to see us cover, let us know.
As an aside, we regularly conduct workshops and trainings like the one we hosted for OHMAR, primarily on topics related to archives and oral history. If you’re interested in partnering with us to offer a workshop for your organization or team, drop us a line at https://www.brightarchives.com/contact.