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Oral history as a field of research, teaching, archival collection, community building or engagement, truth and reconciliation, and creative practice, emerged with the diffusion of the tape recorder in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of enormous social and political upheaval. As a result, oral history was quickly taken up by feminists, working-class and queer activists, racial minorities, and other marginalized people who sought to record the hidden stories that would otherwise be lost. This article introduces readers to the field of oral history, its methodology and ethics. Oral history is a creative practice, open to adaptation and experimentation. As it is a place of listening across difference, oral history interviewing presents itself as a unique learning landscape. Several pedagogical examples are also shared.

Oral history is a field of research that is uniquely positioned to thrive at a time of intense public and scholarly interest in sharing personal stories. Unlike ethnography, oral history has not found an institutional home in North American universities given its often fraught relationship to the history discipline. History is typically grounded in distance--the more the better; whereas oral history is based on the idea of closing distance by learning with the communities we study. Yet oral history is thriving in Canadian universities in the in-between spaces of collaborative cross-disciplinary projects and research centres. After introducing readers to the situation in Canada, the article explores the ways that oral history and storytelling have come together at Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS). Oral history is a creative practice, and one of its great strengths is its openness to a diversity of approaches. This can be seen in the range of research-creation projects undertaken by oral historians at Concordia in the classroom and in our communities. Montreal Life Stories was the most ambitious of these projects, recording the life stories of 500 genocide survivors and integrating their stories in a range of public outcomes such as theatre plays, online digital stories, art installations, radio programming, documentary and animated film, and a museum exhibition. The article ends with consideration of the online Living Archives of Rwandan Genocide Exiles and Survivors as well as the new digital tools under development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note analyzes a Quebec-based oral history contest, 'Memory of a Bygone Era,' which collected nearly a thousand recordings in the 1980s. By returning to this impressive initiative, the co-authors aim to shed light not only on the particular understanding of the emergence of oral history in Quebec, but also on the social context that gave meaning and relevance to what was being 'heard.' After describing the creation and operation of the contest, the different factors that led its organizers to support an endeavour that, in its size and ambition, has never been reproduced in Quebec, are analyzed. Vulgar Marxism, counter-cultural trends, Christian ideology, and nationalism all combined to justify and support the collection of an astonishing number of oral biographies that told the story of Quebec's past from the perspective of ordinary citizens. The attempt to give the voiceless a voice was not, therefore, without ideological implications and may help to explain both the initial success of the contest and the reasons that practically no one remembers this extraordinary initiative today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Holocaust survivor testimony has been the subject of enormous public attention, the educational activism of these survivors has been largely overlooked. Recorded interviews, like public testimonies, have tended to focus on their wartime experiences and specifically the violence they endured. Consequently, little time has been spent exploring their postwar lives and the central role that many have played in Holocaust education. Taking survivors' work seriously allows us to view testimony from a different angle. The reasons they bear witness and how their stories touch and inform those who listen to them become just as significant as what is said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stories Matter is new oral history database building software designed by an interdisciplinary team of oral historians and a software engineer affiliated with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It encourages a shift away from transcription, enabling oral historians to continue to interact with their interviews in an efficient manner without compromising the greater life history context of their interviewees. This article addresses some of the conceptual challenges that arose when developing this software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Elizabeth Miller on the use of documentary films to open up spaces for public dialogue and political action, one which explores the collaborative potential of oral history and digital storytelling, and one by Stacey Zembrzycki about her relationship with her Ukrainian grandmother Baba from Sudbury, Ontario.