Experts Answer to Oral History Questions

100 Questions/24

What is the path of converting personal narratives to historical data in oral history?

2026-4-9

We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week. The goal of this project is to open new doors to an issue and promote scientific discussions in the field of oral history.

In this project, a question is asked every Saturday, and we ask experts to present their views in the form of a short text (about 100 words) by the end of the week. All answers will be published together so that the audience can compare and analyze the views.

The content is the opinions of the senders and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Oral History website. Although the answers are supposed to be based on about 100 words, in order to be polite and not to leave the discussion incomplete, in some cases, answers longer than that are also accepted.

The experts are asked to submit their answers by Sunday night so that all answers can be published on Tuesday.

Answers to question 24:

Gholamreza Azari Khakestar

In general, the process of a converting a personal narrative into a historical data of oral history interviews begins and after the transcription and transformation into the text as oral history data are available to researchers and researchers.

Is any personal narrative part of the oral history? It seems that if the process of data and stories is not from the course of oral history, the validity of those stories requires a verification. The transcription and the texts from interviews and narratives based on documents and written materials can explain historical data. Therefore, oral history centers are valid for personal data because researchers frequently refer to the oral history centers and often refer to the authenticity of these references and rely on it in studies.

Abolfat’h Mo’men

Personal narratives are usually expressed through memory telling, memoirs, diaries, and recording memories, and the absence of an active historian is tangible in them; hence, they cannot generally be regarded as the oral history of dialogue and interaction between the narrator and the interviewer. However, for fact-checking and conversion of these memories to historical data, there are some solutions that are necessary to implement by the historian of oral history:

1. Comparing the same and common examples of different people.

2. Matching narratives with written historical documents relating to events.

3. Take advantage of resources and publications to check and confirm stories.

4. Careful documentation of names, locations, and dates of events.

5. Annotating names, places and words based on the language of the criterion, by preserving the originality of the voice.

6. Using memories studies for reinforcement, together with the transformation of narratives into useful archival data.

Mohammad Mehdi Abdullahzadeh

In the process of converting personal narratives to historical data, each historian uses a unique method that depends on his personality, knowledge, skills, abilities and creativity and the interviewee and the subject and objectives of the interview. These methods must be derived from principles and basis found in oral history theories.

The dos and do-nots which are included in the compilation, makes the text of the interview in Persian standard language; while it is empty of redundancy and not-needed words, the content is valid and in the same way, by using the written symptoms, has the most similarity to the interview tone. The strange words and terms of it have been annotated, and at last an introduction is written, which indicates the story of its creation.

Abolfazl Hassanabadi

The discussion of whether the outcome of the oral history can be called historical data and the possibility of putting the narrative in the historical structure is one of the challenging issues in oral history. Most of the oral histories argue that by standardizing methods in oral history, paved the way of making personal narratives to credible source of research, but that the verbal evidence provided the capability to be used as historical data is a problem that depends on the purpose of performing the project, type of questions being made and the chosen interviewees, so that they can be more reliable.

Gholamreza Azizi

As data is the smallest meaningful unit of information, and information is recorded or structured data (that becomes document or knowledge); then the question can be changed as “what is the path of converting personal narratives (as information) to historical knowledge (as the knowledge of knowing an event in the past, as much as possible closer to truth) in oral history?

It seems that this path is actually going through the same way that the historian uses to analyze the information gathered from it: internal and external criticism. In fact, with these two tools, the authenticity and integrity of the interviewee’s narratives have been measured as much as possible. In fact, by using those two tools, the narrator transforms the information of the past to historical knowledge (in the same sense of historical knowledge).

Hassan Behshtipour

If we want to summarize this, it starts with the narrator in a deep interview, and then the information presented at each session is organized and processed. In the next stage, relevant documents and narratives are adapted. In the fourth stage of the narration, the process is finalized by the new questions from the narrator and in the final stage of the text, the author confirms the narrator.

Shafigheh Niknafs

To obtain the position of research authority for personal narratives, the standard route of historical research such as topic selection, design and addition to interviewees’ choice, doing active interviews, and observing the interviews, observation and interview performed interview, and then the stages of registration in the archive and available for interview and related items should be done. reproduction and preparation of backup copies, exact and complete transcription of interviews, cataloging, entry of information in the software of retrieval and archiving and providing archival services to researchers are the most important steps to become a research data.

In case of necessity, printing and publishing interviews as an independent narrative or a collection of stories, in the form of paper or web publishing, can be another way to translate oral history into research data.

Hamid Qazvini

The personal narrative is taken from a monologue or a person’s hand, and the first step in the way of converting it into a historical data is taken from a monologue or individual manuscript. In fact, this is the fact that the interviewer, representing society and history, starts with a purposeful inquiry of the narrator and deals with the next question to complete the narration and receive details and some kind of initial assessment and shows how important it is. Therefore, the next steps like fact-checking and comparing and adding supplementary explanations and adding documents and images are all hierarchical from the conversion of narrative to historical data.

Seyyid Mohammad Sadegh Feyz

In this method, because the narrator is the historian and the historian is the narrator; some of the subtleties have been neglected, either intentionally or by mistake.

Since the validation is used to examine the veracity of a narrative; it is better that the historian adds to the document with a great obsession, though he adds to his work and adds to the trouble of the reader, but it also adds to the authenticity of his narrative and emphasizes the authenticity of his narrative. This will save the reader from reference to other sources to understand the content of the narrative. Images, journal articles, audios and videos are among the documents that can add to the authenticity of them. While the history of the narrator is not far from the reader’s viewpoint.

Artificial Intelligence

In oral history, a person’s narrative is not a “historical data” on its own, but it is the raw material to pass through a methodology. This path begins with the detailed and professional recording of the interview; then, at the transcription stage, the minimum edition and documentation is established. The decisive step is critical analysis: to measure the validity of the narrator, temporal and spatial reliability, and to deal with other resources (cross-checking). Finally, by interpreting and formulating the validity by the researcher, these data are placed in a meaningful historical context. Thus, the transition to history is the transition from “lived experience” to “documented and measurable knowledge”.