Digital / Media
Oral History Paints a Vivid Picture
- Combining animation and the words of war veterans, “The Return of the Lost Battalion” offers an offbeat narrative.
By Hugh McHarg on March 25, 2009 7:42 AM
Scholars, performers and technologists give voice to stories at the intersection of the personal and the historical at USC and in downtown Los Angeles from March 26-29.
The creators of a machinima history of Japanese-American World War II veterans will join a large cast of innovative oral historians starting on March 27 for the first panel discussion at the New Destinations in Oral History conference at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library.
Machinima refers to animations built with readily available videogame tools. Randall Fujimoto and Joseph Kamiya of the Go for Broke National Education Center will present their video, “The Rescue of the Lost Battalion” and will describe their method of combining animation and the veterans’ words into a historical narrative.
The conference, sponsored by the Southwest Oral History Association, also will feature an introduction to oral history practices and a workshop that will explore digital concepts in oral history and compare types of digital audio recorders.
Second-day panels will cover Latino voices in oral histories, military stories and other topics of broad local and regional interest.
Association organizers cited the city’s status as a regional, national and international nexus of culture and media as one of many reasons for bringing the event to Los Angeles and USC. In addition to oral history practitioners, the multidisciplinary, multi-format program includes performing artists, filmmakers, scholars and students.
“The interdisciplinary and technological aspects of the conference make USC a particularly fitting host for this year’s gathering,” said Claude Zachary, university archivist and member of the conference program committee.
“Our groundbreaking work with new media, the creation and preservation of personal and institutional stories, our commitment to the communities within and surrounding our campuses - these concerns inform so much of what so many of us do every day in the libraries and across USC.”
Indeed, said Sarah Moorhead, president of the Southwest Oral History Association, especially in times of uncertainty or peril, oral history emerges as a way of preserving and presenting complex manifestations of crisis in the lives of individuals.
“Statistics don’t capture the entirety of an event like September 11th or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” Moorhead said, “just as unemployment figures and the Dow Jones average don’t reveal the whole truth of the current ‘great recession.’ The personal experiences, the struggles and successes - oral histories document those with an intimacy and urgency that otherwise would be lost.”
In addition to workshops and panels, the conference program offers tours of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and the museums in Exposition Park.
The conference is organizing a walking tour of nearby Leimert Park and a documentary film screening on March 26. Juan Devis, creator of KCET Web Stories, will deliver the keynote on March 29. The full program is available online at http://www.southwestoralhistory.org/addl_pages/conference.html
Several local and regional institutions collaborated to sponsor this year’s conference, including Arcadia Publishing, the California African-American Museum, the Historical Society of Long Beach, the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and the USC Libraries.
TAGS: humanities
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The Chronicle of Higher Education mentioned USC’s $6 billion fundraising campaign. The story noted that USC had already raised $1 billion in a “quiet phase,” including the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College.
The Guardian (U.K.) highlighted two major gifts to USC in a list of the 10 biggest philanthropic benefactors in America. The list included the $200 million naming gift from USC Trustee and alumnus David Dornsife and wife Dana Dornsife to the USC Dornsife College, and the $110 million gift from USC Trustee and USC Viterbi School alumnus John Mork and wife Julie to create the USC Mork Family Scholars Program.
The New York Times featured the USC U.S.-China Institute documentary “Assignment: China — The Week that Changed the World.” The documentary, part of a series, examines media coverage of the 1972 Nixon trip that reshaped U.S.-China relations after a quarter century of isolation and hostility. “People look back now and take it for granted that the outcome was preordained,” said the institute’s Mike Chinoy, who produced the documentary. Voice of America also featured the story.
Los Angeles Times featured the Oscar Senti-meter, a tool developed by the USC Annenberg School, Los Angeles Times and IBM that analyzes thousands of tweets about the Academy Awards nominees. The story noted that Mexican actor Demian Bechir received an enormous boost on Twitter the day of the nominations, with a total of 6,893 tweets mentioning him, a 47-fold increase from the day before. The story noted the tool uses language-recognition technology developed in collaboration with USC Viterbi School’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab.
The Times of India (India) featured a three-day medical emergency training workshop organized in association with USC. At the workshop, held at GCS Medical College in India, 50 doctors and more than 100 paramedics learned how to improve emergency support systems. William Mallon of the Keck School of USC said that discussion topics included the use of portable ultrasonic devices to scan patients. “The ultrasound applications help physicians make accurate and timely decisions,” he noted. Daily News & Analysis (India) also featured the workshop.
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