Little historiography question.
This month's Library of Congress magazine (which you are free to read online) is all about oral history, and the director of the American Folklife Center gave this definition:
Oral histories offer the individual’s perspective on historical events. Oral-history interviews restore the immediacy of the emotional and psychological impact of events on individuals. These can range from major events like the 1963 March of Washington to more commonplace or personal events. Oral-history collections also serve as corpuses of natural speech, which can tell us a lot about how language is used. So AFC’s extensive oral histories with Jelly Roll Morton tell us not only what one important musician thought about the origin of jazz, but also how he personally pronounced “New Orleans,” both of which are valuable information.
Now, I immediately thought of Twitter because the LoC has an agreement to house all that data. Twitter often documents people's reactions to historical events as they happen, in a more immediate way than diaries, or traditional interview-style recorded oral history. But oral history is typically done "from a distance," or a while after the event, so I don't know how Twitter factors into that. Is the distance important for people to mentally ferment the oral history? Is the interview style important for what oral history is or can someone do solo oral history like this?
Interested in any thoughts!
I don't really think twitter is oral history, but I think it certainly will be used as a historical source at some point assuming the data remains available in the long term.
Historians are going to have an unprecedented amount of data/sources to work with when they/we study this era. I'm sure there will be methodological debates over what exactly to do (they've honestly already started, especially in the Digital Humanities.) There are a host of issues with working with digital sources that we've really only begun to fathom.
Benedict Anderson gave a talk called "Letters, Secrecy, and the Information Age" in which he talks about a great many things, not the least interesting of which was the idea of working with letters vs. e-mail both from the perspective of the writer and the perspective of the historian. He laments the loss of letters as historical sources personally. He is particularly concerned with the idea that letters have a personal quality and leisurely, careful pace, while e-mails sort of demand action from the user which leads to a different quality of the content.
The question is ultimately, though, what do we do with all of these digital "sources"? I'm not sure - especially given mass anonymity - how historians will use them for building narratives. Their use in trying to understand discourse seems valuable, but perhaps by the time historians are looking back at the 2000s seriously discourse analysis will seem a quaint methodology of the past.
But I digress.
I have a very broad definition of what constitutes "Oral History" primarily stemming from my own research interests, which revolve around medieval Latin hagiographical and sermon texts.
When looking at these texts, it is very important to remember that the separation between writing and speech acts is a fairly modern distinction. The mistakes made in pre-carolingian texts, for example, are oral mistakes, even in highly formalized writing. For example, the opening words of a hagiography of a 7th century martyr-saint from the Jura that I'm reading are "In nomini Domini" (properly in nomine Domini), showing the author's inability to distinguish between the vowels i and e.
Similarly, even famous and important documents such as the Dictatus Papae of Pope Gregory VII, a key text in the Investiture Contest of the 11th century, show distinct signs of oral composition, with irregular use of the subjunctive.
My own work is, of course, highly related to orality. Although there are sometimes signs of later redaction and editing, a great deal of sermon literature is more or less a record of an actual speech act, as close as we can get to a tape recording.
What I'm trying to get at here is that it's the mental process that matters, not the precise medium in which the speech-act is conveyed. Twitter, I think, falls much more closely into the realm of orality than it does writing.
Just as that 7th century monk recorded his deficiencies in spoken Latin in the form of that in nomini Domini, there is a constant exchange between conventions of the twittersphere and spoken dialect. Saying "Hashtag [something]" in actual conversation has become somewhat commonplace, never mind earlier internet imports like "WTF" or "LOL" which have now been in conversational use for quite some time.
So, the stream-of-consciousness nature of things like Twitter have once again blurred the lines between writing and speech-act, and thus, I believe, can be considered a form of oral expression, and so they must also be considered oral history.
EDIT: I should add that some modern historians define oral history by the context of the interview. I would instead offer that it is defined by the awareness on the part of the author/speaker that what they are doing is a public (speech) act, and that the interview is a subset of this.
PS: Check this out http://worldmap.harvard.edu/tweetmap/
Twitter is clearly written down. I'd say its more akin to ancient Roman graffiti of the digital age.
No. Your quote is not a definition of oral histories; it is a description of some of the common qualities of oral history. Oral histories are transmitted verbally. Twitter is a written history of peoples' opinions.