Teaching Digital Humanities with Oral History: The Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project and OHMS in the DH Classroom

This article discusses the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—a free and open-source application for making oral histories available online—as a tool for teaching students about key principles in the digital humanities. It does so by describing the application of OHMS to interviews from the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project. By using OHMS in the digital humanities classroom, instructors can involve students in work on an ongoing project, while pushing them to ask critical questions about the digital world around them. This article thus suggests three areas of focus—metadata, markup, and hosting—for courses designed with OHMS in mind.