Friends,
As a colleague of Trebor's at SUNY Buffalo who is much looking forward to a
unique conference, I've been following the list with much interest, and
belatedly offer my own introduction.
I come to your work from very much outside the orbit of alternative media
and arts-I'm an historian, though one who has been involved in both academic
and community-based work for some time. Much of this work has involved oral
and public history, and I've been particularly associated with ideas about
the collaborative nature and possibilities of such practice, and the power
these have to challenge conventional notions of historical representation,
construction, and authority. So in this sense, I'm very much at home with
the collaborative issues at the heart of the "commons" being assembled in
April, and represented in this lively list discussion.
It might interest many of you to know, in fact, how central these issues
have been in the discourse of oral/public history, both in theory and
practice. If it does not seem too immodest to suggest it, my own collection
"A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public
History" (SUNY Press, 1990) might be a good introduction to this discourse.
The book has had a continuous presence in the field, and the term "shared
authority" has come into gratifyingly common usage to get at a number of
ideas very resonant with what you all have been discussing, and doing in
your own work. More recently, there was a special issue of the Oral
History Review (v.30 #1, 2003) devoted to explicitly collaborative projects
more or less responding to this "shared authority" theme, and the
collaborative process more generally. It might be of interest to some of
you-the essays are grounded in an impressive range of oral/public history
projects variously involving prison inmates, sex workers, and homeless
people. I was invited to contribute a small commentary, which might be
relevant to your conference dialogue-my observation was that the welcome
impulse to collaboration was nonetheless taking a potentially problematic
form signaled by a shift in locution from "shared authority" to "sharing
authority," as if the sharing was something "we" chose to do with "them", as
if "we" have the authority until we "choose" to "share" it. In contrast, I
suggested that the point is much more becoming aware of a "shared
authorship" of meaning, and hence a "shared author-ity" that is in fact
inherent in the process and relationships of oral history as such, or even a
conventional exhibit as it is received and responded to: that we are called
on to recognize and engage this already-existing dimension, rather than to
view it as something we are privileged to "create."
Some of these perspectives are embodied in my own applied work, some of
which has had an important collaborative artistic dimension as well-those
visiting Buffalo especially, but also anyone interested in issues
surrounding the representation of working people, might be interested in the
book I was honored to be able to do with Buffalo's resident world-class
documentary photographer, Milton Rogovin: a book of portraits,
photographical and oral-historical, of Buffalo's steelworkers both before
and after the catastrophic closing of almost all of the steelmaking
facilities in this area-life history and portraiture that speak to the
still-current experience, and understanding, of what has unhelpfully been
termed de-industrialization. This book is Portraits in Steel (Cornell Univ
Press, 1993), and represents one of the very few times when the faces and
bodies in documentary photography have claimed and presented their own
voices, names, and consciousness (and very distinct, in this respect, from
the works of working-class romanticists (in my view) such as Sebastiao
Salgado...
One final dimension of introduction that may link my current work more
specifically to the conference. I've recently been involved with deploying
and refining some dramatic new software approaches that permit the direct
indexing, annotation, and cross-referencing of audio-video documentation as
such. Aside from its immediate uses in making oral history and other
documentary collections searchable and usable AS video/audio-rather than
through a reduction to text through transcription that has come to seem
almost "natural," despite its HUGE costs in terms of lost realms of meaning,
this has begun to lead me and my associates into a focus on new non-linear
approaches to documentary : in some senses conventional approaches can be
understood as a response to the difficulty of working with documentation as
a whole, providing a selected linear path through it. But if documentation
can be rendered constantly accessible, searchable, exportable, arrange-able,
at a high level of directed specificity, through placing it in a more
immediate and sharable audio-visual database environment, than the privilege
of path-making can be imagined as something much more broadly shared and
accessible.
I'm not sure how far this line of thinking might go, or how it relates to
many of the references to non-linear documentary that I have seen in the
list discussion to date. I will attach here a couple of brief documents,
including conference abstracts for the major international oral history
meetings coming up in Rome this June, that address the new media tools,
and also what I ended up calling a "post-documentary sensibility."
Certainly, I'll be looking for opportunities to learn from and talk with
many of you about such concerns, and perhaps to share some of the current
work we're doing in audio-video digital indexing. A web-site describing
this work is under construction and should be up very soon-look for it at
www.randforce.com . Meanwhile, I'd be most interested in hearing directly
from anyone with particular interest in such approaches to working with
audio and video collections-we're very much on the lookout for potential
partner projects with which we might collaborate in deploying this approach
in practice, the only real way to explore what it's all about and where it
might be going.
Looking forward to meeting, or e-meeting, many of you,
Mike Frisch
Michael Frisch
Professor of History and American Studies/ Senior Research Scholar
University at Buffalo/ State University of New York
and
Principal, The Randforce Associates, LLC
UB Technology Incubator at Baird Research Park
1576 Sweet Home Road
Amherst, NY 14228
(716) 639-1047
(800) 554-1047
(716) 636-5921 FAX
mfrisch*at*buffalo.edu

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