Behind the Book with Steven High

9781442614659Steven High is one of the editors of Remembering Mass Violence: Oral History, New Media, and Performance. Remembering Mass Violence breaks new ground in oral history, new media, and performance studies by exploring what is at stake when we attempt to represent war, genocide, and other violations of human rights in a variety of creative works.

How did you become involved in your area of research?
I encountered oral history by accident as an undergraduate student. I had returned to my home town of Thunder Bay (Ontario) for the summer and found work at the local museum as an “oral historian.” They gave me a pile of audio cassettes and told me to interview ‘old people.’ It was a fantastic summer and I quickly fell in love the fact that oral history puts a face and a name on the past.

I continued to pursue oral history in the years to come, until 2005 when I was hired by Concordia University as a Canada Research Chair specializing in oral history. Part of my mandate was to establish a new research centre and to develop a large-scale collaborative project. The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling is now a global leader in oral history research.

Remembering Mass Violence originates in a 6-year community-university research alliance project that I headed called Montreal Life Stories, which recorded the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations. These are people who escape violence in other parts of the world (Rwanda, Cambodia, Hitler’s Europe, etc) and have found themselves here in Canada. The project was a collaborative one, with 17 community partners – many from the survivor communities themselves.

In November 2009, the project organized a major international conference on the ways in which oral historians, artists and digital media practitioners engaged with survivor stories. It was a remarkable conference for many reasons. First, I was often surprised by the ways in which participants played with our expectations. Performance was woven into the programme in unexpected ways – as participants both presented and performed their work

What inspired you to write this book?
The book’s 17 chapters originate in our November 2009 conference. Many of the chapters are co-authored, speaking to the collaborative practice that underpins much of our work. Several contributors play with the form and structure of the scholarly article, experimenting with dialogue for example. The book, as a whole, explores the intersections between oral history, digital storytelling, performance, and community-based research.

All three of the book’s co-editors come out of the Montreal Life Stories project. I am, as you know, an oral historian. Ted Little is a professor of theatre, an artistic director and leader of the project’s Oral History Performance group. Ry Duong is a community based research and led the project’s Cambodian group. Together we reflect the diversity of contributors – who include a wide range of perspectives. One chapter was even co-authored by a high school teacher and one of her students. Noellia was a high school student when she co-wrote the article, a junior college student when the book passed peer review, and a university student today.

Do you have to travel much concerning the research/writing of your book?
Absolutely, but not in the way you might expect. As a member of the Montreal Life Stories project I was required to journey to places that I never expected go as a historian. For starters, my own work in the project’s Oral History & Performance group led me to co-teach a full-year course with Ted Little in 2010-2011. Our 26 students were a mix of history and theatre students, including 8-9 graduate students. In the fall term, we formed into project teams and conducted interviews. In the winter term, we explored ways to ‘stage’ or perform these stories. Notably, we all had to perform. In the process, we learned that we listen to someone’s story in a very different way when we know we have to ‘perform’ them later. The sound of someone’s voice, their gestures, articles of clothing – all become visible in ways they do not in oral history transcriptions of the words spoken. This was no small journey for many of us.

What are your current/future projects?
As co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, I am busy with a variety of ongoing projects. I am increasingly interested in finding ways to creatively engage with archived oral history interviews. Too often, once collected, interviews sit in a box on a shelf in an archive – and never listened to. New digital technologies are opening up news ways of engaging with this material. A few years ago, we developed Stories Matter, a free open source database software that allows us to clip and index interviews. We are currently working with a Lu Xiao at the University of Western Ontario on a new visualization tool for human rights researchers that applies some “big data” techniques to the study of the “little data” of oral narratives – allowing us to visualize relationships between interviews in a central display. Next steps, include our planned work to geolocate these interview clips to produce mappings – identifying geographic patterns of significance. We are also interested in audio visualization and sound searching. We know that orality is important, but how do we study the voice (or emotion) with any degree of confidence? We are working to answer this question. Finally, we are interested in incorporating mobility into our analysis, both in terms of “mobility in” (eg. using gps tracking of walking interviews to record interview trajectories) and “mobility out” (eg. being able to move interview content into our mobile devices).

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