Oral History Brings Life to Archives: Wiederhorn & Shorin
Immortalize Mr. Rogers’ Legacy and More
By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.
As people rely increasingly on e-mail, blogs and video sharing
web sites like YouTube to communicate, archivists face a new challenge in
gathering biographical and historical information that will stand the test of
time. With letters and diaries in danger of vanishing from the archival
landscape forever, oral history, which has been an academic pursuit since the
invention of reel-to-reel tape recorders and has become more popular with the
advent of videography, offers an opportunity to immortalize people and events
in a compelling, lifelike form. For Jessica Wiederhorn and Melanie Shorin, who
teamed up in 2005 to create the Narrative Trust, a full service oral history
firm, oral history is both a passion and a thriving new business.
“Oral histories are
primary source materials,” explains Wiederhorn, a cultural anthropologist and
former Associate Director of Columbia University’s Oral History Research
Office. “A collection – an archive – of primary source materials is
a source for writers of biographies, documentary filmmakers, and others. For
institutions, oral history provides a wonderful opportunity to record their
stories and make them available to scholars and researchers in the future.
The pair met while working on the September 11, 2001 Oral
History Narrative & Memory Project, an enormous endeavor initiated by
Columbia’s Oral History Research Office that archived hundreds of interviews
with people directly and indirectly affected by the World Trade Tower
catastrophe. Shorin’s innate curiosity drew her to the project: “I had been
doing a lot of reading of biographies,” explained Shorin, a former journalist
and radio show host. “And I thought, ‘What are people going to base our lives on in the
future?” Shorin found her way to the 9/11 project, where her “ability to stick
with difficult emotional moments” in an interview brought her onto Wiederhorn’s
radar screen.
The rest is history—or oral history as the case may be.
Almost immediately, the talented team secured a contract with the Fred Rogers
Center Videographic Oral History Project, an ambitious undertaking that will
“help document Fred Rogers’ creative process through the first-hand experiences
of colleagues in order to understand the man and his work,” explains
Wiederhorn. The two women have embarked on a daunting schedule that will eventually
comprise fifty interviews with both experts and non-experts—among them,
TV producers, family members and psychologists—who knew the gentle
children’s TV icon, who passed away in 2003 at the age of 74. While the
immediate purpose of the project is to insure that Rogers’ contributions to children’s
television will not be forgotten, “it’s for future historians who may use it
for all sorts of purposes—for instance, somebody may be writing about
early public television, or somebody else may be [studying] the history of
puppetry in the twentieth century...It’s like any other archive: we can’t
predict what its uses may be,” explains Shorin.
Because oral history is subjective, depending on the lens of the
interviewee, it sometimes gets a bad rap for not being factual enough and for
being subject to the faulty memories or spin of the individual being questioned.
“Why is a letter that somebody wrote 300 years ago more accurate?” counters
Shorin rhetorically. Adds Wiederhorn: “We are really living in a time in which
we are seeing the death of the master narrative. A multiplicity of subjectivities
will create the history that each of us will find meaningful.”
Despite oral history’s “purist” naysayers, society has
recognized its rightful place in contemporary historical analysis, as evidenced
by its inclusion in hundreds of credible archives. Not surprisingly, Wiederhorn
and Shorin have encountered a steady demand for their fledgling business. Among
their clientele, is a privately held business, spanning three generations,
which seeks to document the history of their family, their industry, and the
immigrant experience in the twentieth century. “I’ve read about so many
families who, as the generations go on, have lost the values and intentions of
the original founders,” adds Shorin.
In the long run, oral history will live on because, “the written
word, is on the way out as the most valued form of information” says
Wiederhorn.
“It’s better than the portrait hanging on the wall,” sums up
Shorin succinctly.#
