Slowing Down to Listen in the Digital Age: How New Technology Is Changing Oral History Practice

The digital turn has had a profound impact on the practice of oral history. This article calls for a robust and critical reflection on how this turn has impacted both the process of conducting interviews and our efforts to analyze and disseminate them. Using a feminist and humanistic approach to oral history, we examine the ethical and methodological implications of databasing and indexing software, of putting our interviews on the Web, and of engaging with tech capitalism. We argue that oral history interviewing and interpretation are, ideally, intentionally slow processes, while digital technology prides itself on its speed, leading us to ask: how do we reconcile the two?