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MAY 2007

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.#

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