ABSTRACT
Much has been said about the subjective nature of oral history interviewing. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how new meaning is produced at each stage of the oral history process, from recording, transcription and interpretation, to dissemination. There is, however, one type of document produced in oral history practice that is rarely given any critical attention: a timed summary. Their apparent banality as documents means that they are rarely subject to scrutiny, and the painstaking process of producing timed summaries is under-analysed. Accordingly, this chapter reflects upon the layers of production, interpretation, representation and reductive decision-making that go into the creation of these seemingly mundane documents. The chapter draws on examples from my own experience as the writer of timed summaries for the Bringing them Home oral history project, and as the interviewer/timed summary writer for the Reshaping Australian Manufacturing Project. Comparative examples are also drawn from other oral historians’ work, such as the Australian Generations project. The chapter finds that timed summaries are another forum in which an historian exercises power over a narrative, and must use their judgment and caution in relation to (often living) people’s life stories. The intersecting dynamics of power, open information access, future research possibilities and digital data searching drive this inquiry into a type of document that usually remains invisible, a mere ‘finding aid’.
