Digital technologies are opening up new ways of working directly and easily with audio and video interviews. This is welcome news. Analogue audio or video recordings are so ponderous and inaccessible that historians have come to rely on transcriptions. Much is lost in translation. Whereas spoken language is lively; effective prose is systematic, relevant and spare.  For Michael Frisch, the more we “completely strive to make the voice audible on the page, the more we risk making it illegible.” Ultimately, digitization has the potential to put the “oral” back into “oral history” by keeping the focus on the original audio-visual record.

Instead of working up transcripts of the oral interviews, an outdated and time consuming process, we are working with Michael Frisch at the University of Buffalo, a former president of the American Oral History Association, on a revolutionary new high technology approach to oral history. Frisch has developed Interclipper software that digitizes, annotates and indexes a videotaped oral history collection, making it searchable, and therefore usable. It works much like a book index. Digital oral history offers ways of working analytically with the material at every stage, and thus opens up a range of possibilities. Because it permits each passage to be tagged, coded and copied into an interactive database, Interclipper enables a deeper level of analysis of oral history interviews. 

For example, a researcher will be able to analyse passages (back-to-back) from all the interviews on specific points of interest such as childhood aspirations, work life, and so on. Once digitized, the data can be easily exported in generic mini-file formats for use in a range of imaginable formats such as power-point presentations and video CD-ROMs. As a result, Interclipper has the potential to fundamentally change how we think and “do” oral history.

The Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) is a facility dedicated to providing faculty members, graduate students and senior undergraduates who are engaged in oral history research with their digital needs.  Its aims are four fold:

1. Provide access to high quality digital audio and video that turn formerly unwieldy text-based interviews into searchable, community-accessible databases.
   
2. Support the development of innovative research instrumentation based on digital technologies.
   
3. Transform Concordia into a national leader in digital applications to oral history.
   
4. Create a strong and vibrant research space where technological and methodological experimentation and collaboration are encouraged and where students are involved and mentored.

COHDS houses facilities for digital video and audio cataloguing and editing as well as the production of DVDs, CD media, and audio cassettes for research purposes. The lab is equipped to stream research results and oral history interviews to an online platform. It will also be home to Canada’s first searchable oral history database. In consequence, COHRL would act as a hub in the “Center for Public History and New Media” now taking shape. Digital analysis and display of the oral history interviews present us with a golden opportunity to provide leadership in a cutting edge technology being developed in the United States.