Over the course of a semester I’ve read, written, and compiled information about basketball camps, inner city youth arts education, a gymnastics team, Jerry Springer, the Vienna Volksoper, and Frango Mints, amongst many other things. The breadth of experiences and anecdotes covered in Professor Gilfoyle’s interviews is one major takeaway; in ten interviews I’ve gotten to read and learn about the evolution of Chicago — both as a city and as a community.
I believe that the most important takeaway for me in working on the CHM Oral History Project has been my participation in the generation of historical documents and sources. While I certainly took pride in the value of my work for, as Professor Gilfoyle put it at the end of each interview, “future historians,” I was even more interested in the benefits and limits of working with oral interviews as a primary source.
In processing and cleaning up these interviews, I became keenly aware of their limitations. There were many times where editing could only go so far, where the limitations of technology and audio recordings left a word or passage unintelligible. Beyond these technical limitations, there are other obvious but equally critical ones. Professor Gilfoyle may not ask the questions that a future historian wish he’d have asked, or want clarification about — these interviews are entirely impacted by the working relationship and rapport that the interviewer and interviewee have with one another. An even more basic but problematic issue is that of memory; what has the subject forgotten? What have they left out in their answer?
It’s easy, I think, for young history students to implicitly trust sources that we find — there is value in a quote or source that can be easily plugged into a paper or argument. After this experience I’m reminded that it’s incredibly important to interrogate sources, understand their limitations and strengths. Even in the most raw primary sources, a process of selection, of deciding what is or is not important, has taken place; reminding myself of these obvious but overlooked dimensions of research is the thing I’m most grateful for from this internship.