Article published In:
Narrative Inquiry: Online-First Articles

Story alteration in oral history retellings

Methods of comparative work

ORCID logo | HES-SO Valais-Wallis University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland
 | Charles University
 | Charles University
 | Charles University
The digitalization of oral history (OH) has resulted in the availability of multiple interviews conducted with the same narrator under different circumstances. To explore the comparability of such materials, we analyze interviews with a Holocaust survivor from the Fortunoff Video Archive (1979) and the Visual History Archive (1997), focusing on instances in which she tells the “same” episode. We demonstrate that life-story segments before and after the episode provide clues for sense-making and reflexively constitute the narrative environment. The specific interactional features of OH as a situated practice contribute to the story’s recognizability and discursive alteration. Similarities and differences are detectable due to the coherence established by the social setting of OH, including its availability in a digital archive, which guarantees comparability and incorporates a broader chronology. The main contribution of our paper is methodological, as it outlines an apparatus for the comparative analysis of OH across multiple databases.
Keywords: comparative research, digital archives, ethnomethodology, genocide, holocaust, memory, narrative structure, oral history, remembering, visual history
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Seeing “similarities” and “differences”: Everyday comparative practices as a resource and a topic
  • 3.Narrative comparability and the “identity” of a life story
  • 4.Story alteration in content, discourse, and context: A case study
    • 4.1Similarities and differences in a recurrent episode
    • 4.2The episode’s location in the life story
    • 4.3The digital situatedness of OH narratives
    • 4.4An apparatus for comparative work with OH narratives
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 23 January 2025
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.24018.mly
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