The Limitations of the Digitized Oral Archive

On Friday, I made my way to the Healey Library archival reading room. Having been there with the class, there was a feeling of familiarity and confidence that came with the visit. I knew to leave my things by the front desk and that my water bottle could certainly not come with me. I know if it would have been my first visit, much stumbling around and awkward confusion would have been involved, much like the amateurs of some of Farge’s vignettes.

I chose to look at the Lexington Oral History Projects. I knew from the finding aid that contained in the collection were oral histories from Vietnam veterans, but not many details beyond that. The one box that encompassed the collection was brought to me. The contents were as follows: 1 binder, 2 VHS, 2 folders, and 66 CDs. I started with the binder, wherein I discovered a much more intriguing story behind the collection than I had anticipated. In 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, led by John Kerry, organized a march from Boston to Concord, stopping at a few locations to perform “guerrilla” theatre. When they reached Lexington, the veterans, along with many supporters from the community, filled the Lexington Battlegreen with plans to both perform and spend the night there. The city denied access, but veterans and protesters refused to leave, resulting in the arrest of 458 people. The collection of oral histories, gathered in the nineties, details the events leading up to and occurring that night.

A snap of the “guerrilla” theatre

John Kerry surrounded by fellow vets

Upon receiving the box from the archivist, and viewing the fresh DVDs and newly printed labels, I immediately began thinking about the physicality of this archive. Clearly, I wasn’t viewing the original collection of these oral histories, as this compilation had to have been put together within the last few years. This brought to mind questions of the relationship between the physical and the digital. With this collection, the accessibility of the digital archive (the recorded stories themselves) was placed above the physical archive of the stories’ original form—most likely VHS. In addition, not only were the contents of this collection physical copies of the originals, but there was no reference to where the originals were located. As the VHS will someday be a foreign item of the past, should they not be part of the archive as well, even if a new version has been made? It seemed to me that while the stories had been preserved in their digital format—preserving, to some extent, the story of the 1971 event—the event of the gathering of oral histories had been compromised. The ability to fully “breathe in” the dust of the collection in the full historical moment in which it was compiled was gone. A giant piece of the physical collection agent was missing from this collection without any trace as to where it could be found.

While something was lost in the prizing of the digital files of this collection over the physical, a page in the binder noted that an identical collection could be found at the Joiner Center. Although this still presents the loss of the original mechanism, it does reflect the flexibility of the digital archive to escape the “one-of-a-kind-at-one-place” quality that most of the other collections carry.

Moving on to the actual oral histories, knowing that I would barely be able to scratch the surface of the 66 stories in a few hours, I chose three very different interviewees: a Vietnam vet, a journalist, and the judge that presided over the 458 cases of arrest that night. The most striking thing about these stories, besides their varying and powerful perspectives, was the way in which the interviewers controlled the story. While the interviewees wore willingness to tell their stories on their faces, only details were given where details were asked. In this way—and in terms of most oral histories as well—it is the interviewers more than the “magistrate,” as Derrida claims, and the historian, as Steedman seems to believe, who truly hold the power over what is in the archive and what is not.

In addition to the swaying of the interviewers’ questions in the directing and limiting of the story of this archive, time passed and the extent of the digital file also limit the narrative of the event being discussed. In terms of the influences of time passed, all interviewees, at some point espoused that they “can’t remember why” something happened that day, or who was there, etc. Furthermore, many of those present that day have since passed away, continuing the inability of this collection to tell the entire story. Farge writes, “Words carry their present with them, and they tell us of the way things were recognized and differentiated” (82). Considering this, we can also see the limitation of time in the event of the spoken words of the interviewees, who produce from twenty or more years after the event being spoken of. The limitation of the digital file (what has been captured) itself can also be found in these oral histories. Upon starting the interview with the journalist, Emily Frankovich, one finds herself in the midst of a story she’s sharing with the interviewers before the formal collection of the story begins. This demonstrates not only the limitation of the archive to tell the story of the event being discussed, but also the limits of the archive to tell the story of the project itself.

As both Steedman and Farge impress, this archive is an instance of clear incompleteness of a collection, showing that the archive, and thus the history made from it, can never fully encompass the event.