Harford Voices: An Oral History Exhibit (review)

Harford Voices is an online exhibit featuring video excerpts from oral histories about the 1960s and reflections from the Harford Community College (HCC) students who conducted the interviews. Presented as a simply formatted WordPress blog, Harford Voices provides a ready example of the usefulness of oral history in the classroom and how a student oral history project can widen its impact through an online presence.

Dr. James Karmel, Professor of History at HCC (located in Bel Air, Maryland), and his students undertook their oral history project in late 2012 as part of Karmel’s course offering, “The Stormy Sixties at Harford Community College.” The online exhibit, curated by Karmel, contains thirty-five video excerpts arranged under three themes that typify the sixties: Civil Rights, Cultural Change, and Vietnam. These themes are best explored through their respective “Category Archive” pages, accessible from the menu across the top of the homepage. A second menu along the left side of the homepage has similar options, but some of the content available via that menu is incomplete. For example, clicking on “Civil Rights” from the left menu leads to a page with three video excerpts, whereas the “Category Archive” page for Civil Rights has fourteen videos, each presented with a few sentences of introductory context.

On the Harford Voices homepage, videos and student reflections appear in reverse chronological order. The latest posts get top billing, so the initial face of the exhibit is a student reflection posted on June 20, 2013. Although video excerpts comprise the core of the exhibit, they are not apparent until one scrolls down the homepage or clicks into the “Category Archive” pages. Running times for excerpts span from ninety seconds to nearly eight minutes, and most fall into an easily absorbable three- to five-minute range. Videos appear via the “HCC eLearning” Vimeo account (http://vimeo.com/hccelearning), and image and audio quality is decent overall, with only a few excerpts suffering from distracting background noise or insufficient lighting.

Karmel’s students have captured some excellent content that fulfills the criteria of oral history, while also being of historical importance and regional interest. Narrators open up on a wide range of topics, such as racism and discrimination; the 1968 Baltimore Riots; segregated and integrated schooling from the point of view of parents, students, and teachers; the civil rights movement; antiwar protests; the draft and service in the Vietnam War; hippie and beatnik culture; drug use; and the sexual revolution. Exhibit visitors will appreciate the exhibit’s “Narrators” page, which offers biographies of the sixteen interviewees featured. Many of the biographies are in need of copyediting, as is the page introduction, which announces video clips when the page contains only text. Interviewees include Harford County and Maryland natives; the current mayor of Aberdeen, Maryland; HCC and other college professors; former school teachers and public school students; Vietnam veterans; and others.

The remaining bulk of the exhibit comprises textual and video-recorded reflections from the fourteen student interviewers relating their personal experiences with the project, analysis of content, lessons learned, and perspectives changed after participating in the class. Students were required to comment on classmates’ interviews as well as their own, so it is sometimes unclear who or what the students are referring to in their reflections. Similar to the narrator biographies, some of the text here needs copyediting. Despite these minor flaws, the student reflections add a wonderful layer of content to Harford Voices. Many students touch upon how oral historical methods helped them to make meaningful connections between real-life experiences and events they had only “read about in a book.” It is clear that interviewing provided students with a better understanding of the major events of the 1960s and generated more curiosity in them about others’ life experiences in general.

In July 2013, the Oral History Association’s blog included a post from Dr. Karmel about Harford Voices (http://www.oralhistory.org/2013/07/29/blogharford-voices-a-digital-oral-history-exhibit-created-by-harford-community-college-students/), indicating that full interviews will...