StoryCorps (review)

Oral historians have good reason to be concerned about the popularization of oral history. Almost daily, another news source releases an “oral history” of a cultural phenomenon, in which oral history means little more than a cobbling together of interviews and sound bites to form a marketing tool. The rise of citizen journalism and social media gives everyone with a smartphone access to a public that was previously only accessible to professionals. While oral history is becoming increasingly visible in the public eye, the work of oral historians and archivists can become buried underneath the weight of popularized histories, as more people gain access to and interest in the recorded past. An important player in the popularization of oral history is StoryCorps, whose mission is “to provide people of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives” (“About,” StoryCorps, accessed October 19, 2015, http://storycorps.org/about). The organization recently released a mobile recording app and companion website (www.storycorps.me), making it even easier to contribute to their archive and their mission.

In reviewing the app, I consider two basic questions. First, I ask what value the app can hold for oral historians. My second question steps back and addresses broader concerns about oral history as a field: I ask what questions StoryCorps in general, and the app in particular, raise about the popularization of oral history. To begin, however, I want to discuss the actual functionality of the app itself.

The basic workings of the app should be familiar to anyone who has participated in or listened to a StoryCorps recording session. As with the mobile recording booths for which StoryCorps is probably best known, the app allows friends and family members to interview each other. The app, designed with the end user in mind, makes it very easy to set up and record an interview, requiring only the most rudimentary technical skills to function.

To help users prepare for an interview, the app offers a chance to enter the names of the participants, set an estimated time limit, and choose from a list of prewritten questions to help guide the interview. By creating an intended trajectory for the interview and an estimated length, the app encourages the interviewer to think about the end product before hitting record. As a teaching tool, this is probably the most useful part of the app, and it could provide an easy and low-cost way to learn about some of the things oral historians think about.

The provided questions are all fairly open ended, ranging from childhood memories to specific interactions between family members. For a targeted research project, these questions are not likely to produce the desired results, but they could be immensely helpful for recording life histories or as a way to get an interview started. The option to arrange the questions in an appropriate order helps the interviewer to think about a logical flow of questioning, again encouraging a view towards the final product.

As an introductory tool for oral history, the app is undeniably useful. It quickly becomes evident, however, that the app was not designed for oral historians. As an example, once the interview begins, there is no way to pause the recording. The only options are to continue recording or to stop the interview. Nor is there any possibility of editing an interview. This means that every interview is all or nothing, prohibiting participants from pausing to think through difficult questions or deciding which elements of the interview they want publicly released.

These limitations become even more restrictive after the interview is finished. The app allows for the interview to be uploaded to the StoryCorps website or to be kept in the app for future listening. There is no option within the app to export the audio without first uploading it to StoryCorps, making it difficult to use for any project that intends to create its own archive. The...