ABSTRACT

Journalists routinely used interviews from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards and by the turn of this century social investigators valued interview evidence. Amongst historians, after generations of hostility towards interview data, the emergence of the oral history movement since 1945 has forced a reassessment, as Part I of this volume has shown. Portable tape recorders liberated us from laborious note-taking, and the frisson of excited discovery that marks early writings espousing oral history interviewing as the key to discovering more about the past, has given way to a more acute discussion of the interview relationship. It is this discussion that we explore in this section. If there is an emphasis on audio interviewing to the detriment of video techniques, this is partly because of the paucity of good writings on video interviewing and partly because it is considered in Part V.2