Assignment: Oral History Timeline

Randy Nichols, University of Washington, Tacoma

This assignment asks students to use the freely available Timeline JS  to create a timeline of media events that have been important in relation to their community, culture, or subculture. These timelines are based on an oral history interview with someone they see as a leader in that community/culture, and serves as a way for students to connect with the largely white, male histories of media and communication and to create a space for themselves in it. This may involve questions of representation or lack thereof, providing alternative interpretations of events, and knowledge that extends their understanding beyond their own experience. Presenting these timelines serves as a useful way to help other students better understand the experiences of other cultures and communities. The assignment provides a set of questions to help guide and start the interview.

It may work best to scaffold both parts of the assignment – the timeline creation and the interviews – with some practice exercises leading up to this as a final assignment. For the former, students might be asked to produce timelines related to a particular subject area the course is discussing. For the latter, students might be asked to interview a subject as a group (simulating pool reporting) or to interview a fellow student first.

While ostensibly about media history, this assignment builds in useful skills helpful in other, more advanced media productions. Timeline JS allows for a pared-down usage of HTML, which serves as an introduction to both that programming language and to information architecture and multimedia design considerations. More crucially, the assignment requires students to learn about and conduct interviews on a focused topic. As they are doing so, they are also learning to gather and evaluate a range of primary sources, including pictures and other objects the subject of their interview might offer, to help bolster the timeline they are creating. These skills are vital to a range of media production skills, which allows courses which might otherwise be seen as separate from production to reinforce key ideas and practices.

Download the assignment PDF: Oral-History-Timeline.

Keywords: history, interview, oral history, timeline