Studs Terkel Radio Archive (review)

Few individuals are more closely identified with the field of oral history than is Studs Terkel (1912–2008). Between 1952 and 1997, he conducted thousands of live radio interviews on Chicago's WFMT Radio Network, broadcasts carried by stations throughout the country. His first show on WFMT, Sounds of the City, took him into the streets of his beloved Chicago with a tape recorder, recording personal narratives of the denizens of the city. Division Street: America (1967), an exploration of the personal narratives of six dozen diverse individuals residing in Chicago, established Terkel's signature publishing regimen: editing his on-air interviews into highly crafted textual works. The books that followed—many now classics widely assigned to university students around the country—soon made him one of the nation's most famous oral historians.

Terkel's live interviews and books probed personal narratives of both common folk and celebrities. They explored and revealed, through skillfully and sensitively extracted oral memories, hidden dimensions of America's twentieth-century past: art and culture, World War II, labor history, the Great Depression, the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, race and the Civil Rights Movement, and many other subjects. One of Terkel's books, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two (1984), earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1985; many more recognitions and honors followed. Now, a decade after his death and more than a half-century after his entry into the field of oral history, we have presented to us a gateway into all of Terkel's prodigious work as an oral historian in the form of an online archive of his radio interviews.

Formally launched in May 2018, the ever-growing Studs Terkel Radio Archive (STRA) will provide access to most of Terkel's 5,600 radio programs—more than 9,000 hours of audio from his broadcasts on WFMT. Presently there are 1,200 broadcasts available. The Chicago Historical Museum (CHM), to which Terkel donated his voluminous collection of recordings after joining the staff of the CHM in 1997, produced an earlier archival project around Terkel's interviews ("Studs Terkel: Conversations with America") in partnership with Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University. That earlier 2002 project offered access to a selection of Terkel's interviews and was organized around the dozens of books he produced around those interviews (http://studsterkel.matrix.msu.edu/index.php). The Studs Terkel Radio Archive offers far wider and more comprehensive access to Terkel's full body of work.

The Archive project began with a planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2014 and an additional NEH implementation grant in 2016. Additional funding came from various individuals and foundations—and most recently from a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $87,000. Generous funding helped move the project forward. Built on a versatile digital platform, and jointly managed by the Chicago Historical Museum and the WFMT Radio Network, the Archive is replete with a range of special features that makes it an especially valuable research and teaching site.

The story of the technical foundations of the website is fascinating. With the assistance of the Library of Congress, which recognized the historical value of Terkel's recordings, the Library's state-of-the-art lab in Culpepper, Virginia, digitized thousands of Terkel's tapes. The digital recordings were then integrated into Starchive (https://starchive.io), a cloud-based digital asset management platform created by Digital ReLab Company. Starchive allows users to navigate through Terkel's broadcasts using topical, subject name, date, and keyword search algorithms. Like the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)—with which readers might be familiar—the Terkel Radio Archive seamlessly integrates text and audio, providing users with interactive transcripts. It does this utilizing a very sophisticated and versatile text-to-audio/video software, Hyperaudio (https://Hyperaud.io), that also provides copy, cut, and paste functionality and facilitates selective re-use...