Did Hamilton Ever Use the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression? Reflections on the (Re-)Use of Oral Histories and Their Accessibility via the ComBio Website (2024)
Freeborn, Alfred (Author)
Keuck, Lara (Author)
Hanna Lucia Worliczek (Author)
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Volume: 54
Issue: 4
Pages: 527-534
Saul Benison, a central figure in establishing interview collections in the history of science and medicine, noted already in 1962 that “we often forget that it is not enough to collect documents. They must be used and analysed. Our archives are too dusty and too quiet.”1 Oral history collections have been expanded or newly created since then, and some of those collections offer at least partial online access. But there are still limitations to their use.2 The sheer number of such interviews available online hosted by various institutions, each of them with their own logics for access and metadata, pose serious challenges for accessing them as a corpus—it has been impossible to search across all these collections. We have developed a project and website, called Commoning Biomedicine, hereafter ComBio, that provides a platform to make oral history sources on biomedicine more accessible and searchable.3 The ComBio website is a collaborative project between digital humanists and historians of science that provides a cross-platform search function. Enabling researchers to search many collections at once realizes the founding vision of oral history collections, allowing more people to use and analyze these sources, and to confidently treat them as a corpus, including the necessary critique of its coverage. But as we will elaborate, the possibility to search across collections also expands the epistemic uses of existing interviews. In this essay, we illustrate how aspects of accessibility—and considerations about archival politics in the digital age—shape the secondary use of interviews, thereby reflecting how our project has been influenced by the history of oral history as well as by contemporary ethical and political discourses on history writing. Let us start with an example.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Venkat Srinivasan;
T. B. Dinesh;
Bhanu Prakash;
A. Shalini;
(2018)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at Institutional History: A Model for Digital Exhibitions from Science Archives
(/isis/citation/CBB040487681/)
Article
Samantha Blickhan;
Eleanor Bird;
Andrew Lacey;
Alexis Wolf;
(2024)
The benefits of ‘slow’ development: towards a best practice for sustainable technical infrastructure through the Davy Notebooks Project
(/isis/citation/CBB982866226/)
Chapter
Misa, Thomas J.;
(2009)
Organizing the history of computing: Lessons learned at the Charles Babbage Institute
(/isis/citation/CBB001180670/)
Article
Olaf Schmidt-Rutsch;
(2019)
Arbeit - wie sie nicht im Buche steht: das Erinnerungsarchiv Industriearbeit des LWL-Industriemuseums (Work - not as a textbook example: the Industrial Work Memorial Archive of the LWL Industrial Museum)
(/isis/citation/CBB755771059/)
Article
Jessica Isaac;
(2016)
Graphing the Archives of Nineteenth-Century Amateur Newspapers
(/isis/citation/CBB946183585/)
Article
Lauren Kassell;
(2021)
Inscribed, Coded, Archived: Digitizing Early Modern Medical Casebooks
(/isis/citation/CBB044945579/)
Article
Norman Henniges;
Rau, Susanne;
René Smolarski;
Heiko Tzschach;
(2016)
Mehr als nur Karten. Das Virtuelle Kartenlabor (GlobMapLab) als Zugang zur Sammlung Perthes
(/isis/citation/CBB313977758/)
Book
Mary Caton Lingold;
Darren Mueller;
Whitney Anne Trettien;
(2018)
Digital Sound Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB176872339/)
Article
Petr Žabička;
Miloš Pacek;
(2019)
Cataloguing and Presentation Tools for Old Maps and Map Series
(/isis/citation/CBB031052902/)
Book
Rita Lucarelli;
Joshua Aaron Roberson;
Steve Vinson;
(2023)
Ancient Egypt, New Technology: The Present and Future of Computer Visualization, Virtual Reality and Other Digital Humanities in Egyptology
(/isis/citation/CBB703866440/)
Article
Brewster Kahle;
Lila Bailey;
(2024)
Archiving History in Real Time: Newspaper Collections at the Internet Archive
(/isis/citation/CBB709471347/)
Article
Kalani Craig;
Arlene J Díaz;
David Kloster;
(2024)
The Coded Language of Empire: Digital History, Archival Deep Dives, and the Imperial United States in Cuba’s Third War of Independence
(/isis/citation/CBB093739958/)
Article
Mary Virginia Orna;
(2022)
Archaeological Chemistry: Past, Present, Future
(/isis/citation/CBB532695309/)
Chapter
Maria Chiara Deflorian;
Alessandra Faes;
Alessandra Franceschini;
(2022)
Libri, lettere e ragni: I materiali di Giovanni Canestrini a Trento
(/isis/citation/CBB231808360/)
Chapter
Margherita Azzari;
Camillo Berti;
Laura Cassi;
(2019)
L'eredità dei geografi dell'Istituto di Studi Superiori di Firenze (1859-1924). Un patrimonio di idee e di documenti da scoprire
(/isis/citation/CBB134710616/)
Chapter
Annalisa Banzi;
Edoardo Rovida;
(2014)
Collezioni, archivi, musei
(/isis/citation/CBB331048322/)
Thesis
Dunn, Rhonda Thayer;
(2011)
Designing a Griotte for the Global Village: Increasing the Evidentiary Value of Oral Histories for Use in Digital Libraries
(/isis/citation/CBB001567311/)
Article
Boris Jardine;
Joshua Nall;
(2023)
The Lab in the Museum. Or, Using New Scientific Instruments to Look at Old Scientific Instruments
(/isis/citation/CBB583013797/)
Article
Petra Weigel;
(2017)
Geographische Wissensproduktion – Reflexionen aus der Perspektive der geographie- und kartographiehistorischen Sammlung Perthes der Forschungsbibliothek Gotha
(/isis/citation/CBB260003412/)
Article
Bruce T. Moran;
(2022)
Alchemy, Sources, and Digital Exploring at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel
(/isis/citation/CBB909767983/)
Be the first to comment!