27 September 2016

HAD Seeks Interviewees and Survey Responses for Oral History Project

Jarita Holbrook University of Edinburgh

The AAS Oral History Project is a major project designed and run by Historical Astronomy Division (HAD) members. At the 2015 AAS/International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Hawaii, we rolled out our Oral History "Booth:" two rooms dedicated to collecting oral history interviews from among the conference attendees. This model has worked very well leading to a backlog of interviews that have yet to be transcribed! The process goes as follows: people volunteer to be interviewed via the online signup sheet, their interviews are voice recorded, the recordings are given to the AAS and American Institute of Physics (AIP) for transcription, the transcripts are edited by the interviewees, and finally, the transcripts are placed in the AIP online oral history archive.

The entire process takes about two years for each interview. Why so long? The slow down is at two points: 1) the transcription of the interviews and 2) the interviewees reviewing and approving the final transcript. The first has been addressed by the AAS contracting to have some of the interviews transcribed relieving the backlog at AIP, but the second is harder to solve. The interviews are rich in detail and often capture the complicated/challenging relationships between and among astronomers. Sometimes there is nervousness about having such details revealed in such a public manner. However, there is the option of not releasing parts of the interviews until a future date. This caveat has sped up the editing and approval time somewhat, but not entirely.

We are excited to have such a rich collection of interviews and to date, we have only recorded the stories of a small fraction of the AAS membership! Please consider volunteering to be interviewed at one of our future AAS meetings. We will have a dedicated oral history room at the DPS 48 / EPSC 11 meeting in Pasadena, California, the 2017 AAS winter meeting in Grapevine, Texas, and at the 2017 HEAD meeting in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Sign up for an Oral History Project interview at these upcoming meetings:

DPS 48 / EPSC 11 (Pasadena) Signup Sheet     229th AAS Meeting (Grapevine) Signup Sheet
The HEAD meeting signup sheet is forthcoming.

Both the 2017 winter and summer AAS meetings are in Texas, thus we are not sure if we should have an oral history room at the AAS summer meeting in Austin. Please take a moment to complete a one question survey so that we can determine whether or not we should come to Austin.

We are looking forward to getting your opinion!