Events:

• 18.10 Beursschouwburg (not Myriam)
  • guest:
• 22.11 Beursschouwburg (maybe not Sarah)
  • guest: Azara
• 20.12 Beursschouwburg
  • guest: Mwanamke?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_slogans

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_recordings

Beursschouwburg 2
18:00 - arrival
18:15 - start introduction JFTR and link to what lead us to Chanting & Recording 30 min
18:45 - introduce food and resources - small break for grabbing food and installing last bits 10 min
18:55 - introduction Azahara (5 min)
19:00 - Azahara Performance (30 min ish)
19:30ish finish. - Short break to re-set the room (10 min)
19:40 - Oral history presentations (Round of introductions?) (all in 30 min) - Group discussion?
20:15 - Optional second part - editing for those who want to continue (45 min)
21:00ish - Round off

• Obituary Helen John, founder of Greenham Common

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/13/helen-john-obituary




Beursschouwburg 1

• intro Just for the record, thanks
• intro to this workshop:
  • re·writing of history > writing

In the occidental history, the publication has since the invention of its paper format, the book, a central position. The written forms, then more precisely printed ones, have become primary compared to other forms of communication. Today they remain primary in many domains, and particularly in academic spheres, where a proposition doesn’t really exist until it is published. In these domains, the publication has the power to make something exist.
It is also the case for new platforms for knowledge like Wikipedia, a project born in the year 2001 which changes the way writing and distributing knowledge has always worked. It proposes a participative platform, open to all and evolutive. But its validation system for the sources of knowledge remains in a tradition of primacy of the published: each information, to be added, must be justified by the quote of a published source. A similar validation system as in the academic spheres defines which information will fit into the online writing of history and knowledge that happens on Wikipedia, and those who will be excluded. — Through time, some publications have been identified as more legitimate than others. Wikipedia continues this tradition, asserting a hierarchy of judging sources, which postulates that an academic publication is more trustworthy than a self-published essay. Secondary publications (a publication about a topic) has more value and weight than a primary source. “Speaking of” has more value than “speaking”.

• fragility of oral sources
  • Susan Hiller, The Last Silent Movie, 2007-2008
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJtSkdf6IQ4
• if women couldn’t access to writing (Joanna Russ, How to supress women’s writing), they could express themselves through other way of communication > oral tradition of telling stories
• telling stories / faire des histoires
• telling stories (outside of the traditionnal writen way (only what is writen down count ?)
• stories vs history, oral vs written ? Telling our Stories: feminist debates and the use of oral history http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029400200046

(historical memory, experiences, )

• stories / history: “I wanted to get to the root of queer history: the word “story.” For  generations, our histories were preserved not in books or movies or  college courses, but in tales told in bars and beds, passed from eager  queer mouth to hungry queer ear. It was a personal and precarious  tradition, a cross between an inheritance and a game of telephone. Our  history was quite literally alive, existing only in the minds and hearts  of those who lived it, heard it, and shared it.” https://www.them.us/story/themstory-mabel-hampton?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook
• oral history is not considered as "objective" vs written one considered as an objective reference (cf wikipedia pillars?). 
• For exemple it would be unthinkable for historians to host a conference session asking ?written sources: what is their use??
• but written history says only one side story. while oral history is shapes by gender, race and class. and shows then a diversity of view on "reality". Men remember history differently than women, managers tha workers and they re-tell all their stories differently
  • Consider the total production of books in all languages from the UK, South Africa and India in 2005:
    • UK: 161,000 books / 60 million people
    • South Africa: 6100 books / 48 million people
    • India: 97,000 books / 1100 million people
  • If we were to measure books produced in 2005 per person per country, the comparison is more stark:
    • UK: 1 book per 372 people
    • South Africa: 1 book per 7869 people
    • India: 1 book per 11,371 people
• oral history seen as designed to fill the blank in women or traditional history (cf wikipedia sees it as an illustration)
• oral history in fact is full of information, it tells another version of history, it tells about memory construction
• it reshape the worl memory, listening to marginalised person words and might challenged these dominant written history and ideals
• we might more see oral and written as complementary than one illustrating the other
• oral “communication”: underground way of resistance (decolonization, …)
• oral history is often used as a way to pass on information and knowledge.
• oral history often keeps alive some erased part of history. Like after african decolonization
• African american songs
• abortion in south America
• women associated to minimized oral ways of expressions: gossip, …
• Ramaya Tegegne, Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz, Marbriers 4, 2014. Tegegne uses the concept of ‘gossip’ – not simply as a means of communication but as a speculative mode of thought and a productive  force – to create new ways of collectively thinking through the dynamics  of trust, intimacy and sharing.
• In her essay ‘Witch-Hunt,’ for Tank magazine, artist Hannah Black frames gossip both as a language of  female resistance and as an indispensable form of emotional labor. She  writes: “Gossip has always been a secret language of friendship and resistance between women” + “Hatred of gossip is hatred of women talking to each other—it is  generally women who do this work of love…. Communities of gossips nurse  each other through the degradations that partners, bosses and families inflict on us.” For marginalized people, gossip has a dual function: it  works to both affirm communal bonds and unsettle the positions of those  in power.
• oral histories as a tool
• Consciousness-raising groups: meetings often involved "going around the room and talking" about issues in their own lives. 
• slogans, chants
  • PLAY Greenham Commons songs http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/#songs
  • slogans: tremate, tremate le streghe son’ tornate
• 
  

• Women's oral history-history - book - Women's Oral History : The Frontiers Reader, collection of 19 essays, edited by Susan H Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon.
  • What's so special about Women ('s oral history) ?
  • Women challenging the traditional concepts of history. 
    • What is historically important
    • using oral history to reconstruct our own past
    • Scratch the surface and see there is not enough - women's history and other marginalized groups
    • what does it mean to look out the window with a woman's eyes (American playwright and poet, afro-feminist)
    • Relatively recent that women were leading public lives
  • Time-travel - Siri Hustvedt
    • So historians looked to oral history methods
    • Method often believed to be developed by Allan Nevins 1948 at a time when invention of the telephone caused a "draught" in oral sources. People were suddenly communicating orally. 
      • Today it is different again, with internet, emails and texts giving us an overflow of text-based resources, big data. 
      • But we have learned something on the way.
  • One could say that Allan Nevins development of the method of oral sources brought oral history to academia. 
    • But the way women often use oral history is different, 
    • Looking to the states, and to this book, i quote (Page 4)

• Women's oral history is special, significantly that it has developed into a field of its own, and primarly through the work of women outside of the major universities or oral history centers.
  • This brings it close to the structure of grassroots movements. P239
  • Grassroots movements also demands a different way of being analyzed than centralised movements. 
  • If one is to write down history it is important to be able to identlfy key events, documents (of any kind) persons. 
    • Gossip
• oral histoory is not, nor should be, a province of experts - there is not ONE way
  • Therefore also links to the structure of Wikipedia
• Traditionally women's oral history has been used to: 
  • To ensure dicipline and unity in the community
  • To retain pride in the own tradition
  • To identify who and what is important
  • To map the power elite
  • To ensure that gender roles and expectations were met, kept (or altered?)
  • To pass on knowledge to future generations
• For years women have been socialised to be bearers of culture and tradition.
  • Can you think of any oral herstory which has been handed down to you?

• Wikipedia research on oral history
  • page that asks for recording (status? -> illustration?)
• Translation - positioning translation within cultural studies

Myriam:
(Notes de lecture Quand les femmes témoignent)
- oral history and women's history are chronologically two parallel undertakings since the late 1960s
- oral history is necessary to the history of women to fill the documentary gaps of the written sources p.12
 
Distinction, but also permeability between 
oral history and oral tradition:
 
Oral history: history in the form of interviews / interviews of people
 
Oral tradition: "collective sources, transmitted from one generation to the next, and constituting a kind of commual memory, relating to the origins, the dynasties or the great historical events that marked it"
 
Particularities Oral history (in the sense of interviews / interviews)
 
Criticized aspects :
- memory problems, difficulty to trace a chronology especially long after the facts
- excluding topics p.120
- contradictory answers between the testimonies p.120
 
Positive aspects :
- More space for the interviewee. Brings topics that were not addressed at first, which are added to subsequent interviews, so participates in research
- access to the sociological profile of the persons interviewed (class) not present in the written documents
- possibility to ask delicate questions in a roundabout way, to analyze the way things are said to get answers that wouldn’t be available if asked too straightforwardly (silences, hesitations, repetitions, laughs, your etc.)
- Hearing opinions that are not part of "official" opinions 
à Link with Azahara's presentation?
- Mercedes Vilanova (wiki page only in Catalan): it's not about '' giving a voice '' (recurrent expression) to anyone (everyone speaks in different places), but to listen to ''invisible majorities '' and integrate them into the writing of history. '' P.13






Beursschouwburg 2

Schedule outline: 

18:00 - arrival
18:15 - start introduction JFTR and link to what lead us to Chanting & Recording 30 min
18:45 - introduce food and resources - small break for grabbing food and installing last bits 10 min
19:00 - introduction Azahara (1 min)
19:00 - Azahara Performance (30 min ish)
19:30ish finish. - Short break to re-set the room (10 min)
19:40 - Group discussion - 
20:00 - Optional second part - editing for those who want to continue (45 min)
21:00ish - Round off






Loraine: 

• intro Just for the record, thanks
• intro to this workshop:
  • re·writing of history > writing

In the occidental history, the publication has since the invention of its paper format, the book, a central position. The written forms, then more precisely printed ones, have become primary compared to other forms of communication. Today they remain primary in many domains, and particularly in academic spheres, where a proposition doesn’t really exist until it is published. In these domains, the publication has the power to make something exist.
It is also the case for new platforms for knowledge like Wikipedia, a project born in the year 2001 which changes the way writing and distributing knowledge has always worked. It proposes a participative platform, open to all and evolutive. But its validation system for the sources of knowledge remains in a tradition of primacy of the published: each information, to be added, must be justified by the quote of a published source. A similar validation system as in the academic spheres defines which information will fit into the online writing of history and knowledge that happens on Wikipedia, and those who will be excluded. — Through time, some publications have been identified as more legitimate than others. Wikipedia continues this tradition, asserting a hierarchy of judging sources, which postulates that an academic publication is more trustworthy than a self-published essay. Secondary publications (a publication about a topic) has more value and weight than a primary source. “Speaking of” has more value than “speaking”.

• fragility of oral sources
  • Susan Hiller, The Last Silent Movie, 2007-2008
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJtSkdf6IQ4
• if women couldn’t access to writing (Joanna Russ, How to supress women’s writing), they could express themselves through other way of communication > oral tradition of telling stories
• telling stories / faire des histoires
• telling stories (outside of the traditionnal writen way (only what is writen down count ?)
• stories vs history, oral vs written ? Telling our Stories: feminist debates and the use of oral history http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029400200046

(historical memory, experiences, )

• stories / history: “I wanted to get to the root of queer history: the word “story.” For  generations, our histories were preserved not in books or movies or  college courses, but in tales told in bars and beds, passed from eager  queer mouth to hungry queer ear. It was a personal and precarious  tradition, a cross between an inheritance and a game of telephone. Our  history was quite literally alive, existing only in the minds and hearts  of those who lived it, heard it, and shared it.” https://www.them.us/story/themstory-mabel-hampton?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook
• oral history is not considered as "objective" vs written one considered as an objective reference (cf wikipedia pillars?). 
• For exemple it would be unthinkable for historians to host a conference session asking ?written sources: what is their use??
• but written history says only one side story. while oral history is shapes by gender, race and class. and shows then a diversity of view on "reality". Men remember history differently than women, managers than workers and they re-tell all their stories differently

• (Mia) Consider we did not make an effort to find a way to include oral sources when we write history, and think of these numbers: 
  • - The total production of books in all languages from the UK, South Africa and India in 2005:
    • UK: 161,000 books / 60 million people
    • South Africa: 6100 books / 48 million people
    • India: 97,000 books / 1100 million people
  • If we were to measure books produced in 2005 per person per country, the comparison is more stark:
    • UK: 1 book per 372 people
    • South Africa: 1 book per 7869 people
    • India: 1 book per 11,371 people

• (Loraine/Mia?) 
• oral history seen as designed to fill the blank in women or traditional history (cf wikipedia sees it as an illustration)
• oral history in fact is full of information, it tells another version of history, it tells about memory construction
• it reshape the worl memory, listening to marginalised person words and might challenged these dominant written history and ideals
• we might more see oral and written as complementary than one illustrating the other
• oral “communication”: underground way of resistance (decolonization, …)
• oral history is often used as a way to pass on information and knowledge.
• oral history often keeps alive some erased part of history. Like after african decolonization
• African american songs
• abortion in south America
• women associated to minimized oral ways of expressions: gossip, …
• Ramaya Tegegne, Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz, Marbriers 4, 2014. Tegegne uses the concept of ‘gossip’ – not simply as a means of communication but as a speculative mode of thought and a productive  force – to create new ways of collectively thinking through the dynamics  of trust, intimacy and sharing.
• In her essay ‘Witch-Hunt,’ for Tank magazine, artist Hannah Black frames gossip both as a language of  female resistance and as an indispensable form of emotional labor. She  writes: “Gossip has always been a secret language of friendship and resistance between women” + “Hatred of gossip is hatred of women talking to each other—it is  generally women who do this work of love…. Communities of gossips nurse  each other through the degradations that partners, bosses and families inflict on us.” For marginalized people, gossip has a dual function: it  works to both affirm communal bonds and unsettle the positions of those  in power.
• oral histories as a tool
• Consciousness-raising groups: meetings often involved "going around the room and talking" about issues in their own lives. 
• slogans, chants
  • PLAY Greenham Commons songs http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/#songs
• Mention: The loss of Helen John, founder of Greenham Common
• Obituary : https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/13/helen-john-obituary
  • slogans: tremate, tremate le streghe son’ tornate

(Mia)

• Women's oral history-history - book - Women's Oral History : The Frontiers Reader, collection of 19 essays, edited by Susan H Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon.
  • What's so special about Women ('s oral history) ?
  • Women challenging the traditional concepts of history. 
    • What is historically important
    • using oral history to reconstruct our own past
    • Scratch the surface and see there is not enough - women's history and other marginalized groups
    • what does it mean to look out the window with a woman's eyes (Ntozake Shange - American playwright and poet, afro-feminist)
    • Relatively recent that women were leading public lives
  • Time-travel - Siri Hustvedt
    • Late 1940's historians looked to oral sources
    • Method often believed to be developed by Allan Nevins 1948 at a time when invention of the telephone caused a "draught" in oral sources. People were suddenly communicating orally. 
      • Today it is different again, with internet, emails and texts giving us an overflow of text-based resources, big data. 
      • But we have learned something on the way.
  • One could say that Allan Nevins development of the method of oral sources brought oral history to academia. 
    • But the way of women's oral history is different, 
    • Looking to the states, and to this book, i quote (Page 4)

• Women's oral history is special, significantly that it has developed into a field of its own, and primarly through the work of women outside of the major universities or oral history centers.
  • This brings it close to the structure of grassroots movements. P239
  • Grassroots movements also demands a different way of being analyzed than centralised movements. 
  • If we want to understand how to work with women's oral history we have to understand
  • If one is to write down history it is important to be able to identlfy key events, documents (of any kind) persons. 
    • Gossip

• For years women have been socialised to be bearers of culture and tradition.
  • Ask yourselves: Can you think of any oral herstory which has been handed down to you and in which context

Myriam:
Reading notes taken from Quand les femmes témoignent

- oral history and women's history are chronologically two parallel undertakings since the late 1960s
- oral history is necessary to the history of women to fill the documentary gaps of the written sources p.12

Come back ton the Distinction, but also permeability between oral history and oral tradition:

Oral history: history in the form of interviews / interviews of people

Oral tradition: 
"collective sources, transmitted from one generation to the next, and constituting a kind of commual memory, relating to the origins, the dynasties or the great historical events that marked it"

Particularities Oral history (in the sense of interviews / interviews)

While there are some Criticized aspects like :
- memory problems, difficulty to trace a chronology especially long after the facts
- difficulty to focus on the topic that is being researched p.120
- contradictory answers between the testimonies p.120

There also are specific positive aspects like :
- having access to the sociological profile of the persons interviewed, which not always present in written documents
- possibility to ask delicate questions in a roundabout way, to analyze the way things are said to get answers that wouldn’t be available if asked too straightforwardly (silences, hesitations, repetitions, laughs, your etc.) p.111
- More space for the interviewee to brings topics that were not addressed at first. These new topics can then change the orientation of the historian's research and bring new angles to historical events p.101
- Hearing opinions that are not part of "official" opinions 
- The historian Mercedes Vilanova said the many interviews she conducted with working class and illiterate people influenced greatly her researches about spanish history. Talking about oral history she said: it's not about '' giving a voice '' (which is a recurrent expression) to anyone (everyone speaks in different places), but to listen to ''invisible majorities '' and integrate them into the writing of history. '' P.13




After Performance: 

Round of introductions (name, where you're from, what you do or what brought you here)

• oral histoory is not, nor should be, a province of experts - there is not ONE way - There is no expert, but a mulitude of layered thruths
  • Therefore also links to the structure of Wikipedia - Collective writing.

• Wikipedia research on oral history
  • (If not already mentioned: page that asks for recording ---- status -> illustration.)
• Also raises questions of translation, between both languages and mediums - Gender in Translation by Sherry Simon - positioning translation within cultural studies

• Traditionally women's oral history has been used to: 
  • To ensure dicipline and unity in the community
  • To retain pride in the own tradition
  • To identify who and what is important
  • To map the power elite
  • To ensure that gender roles and expectations were met, kept (or altered?)
  • To pass on knowledge to future generations

• Trying to get a grasp of how oral history has played a role in your own life:
• Exercise: Note 3 examples of positive sayings about women or girls in your community

Beursschouwburg 3

PLAN

• Welcome and present names

• JFTR introduction
• (Loraine) Gender gap on wikipedia – 5 min
  • Wikipedia = anyone can edit … but not everyone seems welcome
  • surveys about gender of contributors: women underrepresented
• Problematics of representation on Wikipedia: 
  • secondary sources (talk about) rather than primary (speaking oneself) > post-colonial studies, subaltern studies – 1 min
  • based on a biased system (academic, legitimate publishing) => mostly written sources that exclude oral sources which represent a part of people history – 1 min
  • (Myriam) Oral sources on Wikipedia? – 10 mins
    • Slide: numbers of publications, 
    • Slide: wikipedia specifics
• (Mia) Women part of the excluded groups (relevant as we are looking into what causes the gender gap) - 5 min
• What is special about women's oral history, grass roots.
  • (Mia and Loraine) pejorated: gossips, “jasette” (revue Sorcières), “faire des histoires” - 2 min
  • re-appropriated: gossip, consciousness-raising = strategies for communication, transmission and activism (> chants at Greenham Commons)
• (Sarah) Oral history on other platforms - 10min
  • oral sources on wikipedia treated as illustrative material
  • Alternative ways to treat oral sources: Wiki Africa? 
  • How other platforms deal with oral sources.

////////

• Séverine’s presentation
• ping-pong and already show stuff
  • other exemples on 
  • examples of “illustrative” sounds on pages
  • project about oral history in India?
  • video?
  • upload recording on wikimedia commons 
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_recordings
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Voice_intro_project, 
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Creation_and_usage_of_media_files
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia
  • Look up facts  
    • https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/people-are-knowledge (video: https://vimeo.com/26469276 )
    • https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Evaluating_sources
    • https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Audio
  • Relevant articles to check
    • Reacting to video of 2011http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html
    • https://www.gadgetsnow.com/careers/education/Oral-citations-to-be-part-of-wikipedia-entries/articleshow/9731975.cms
    • https://books.google.be/books?id=6IpwCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA127&lpg=PA127&dq=status+oral+citation+wikipedia&source=bl&ots=x7fRBG_Y4S&sig=RHbJdYDBCSfiepkKB5eCu6UdTDc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwic5eP3xI_YAhWIKsAKHRXfBVUQ6AEIXDAI#v=onepage&q&f=false
  • license
• technical Wikipedia presentation

NOTES BSB 3

Mia + Sarah
Welcome
Ahead of starting, to orientation: Languages (We will start with a short presentation in English, followed by etc.) Toilets, child-care and food. 

Loraine: 5 min

• we are JFTR, working on gender representations in the re·writing of history — for 2 years on Wikipedia (new way of writing history, collaborative, free…)
• Wikipedia = anyone can edit … but not everyone seems welcome
• surveys about gender of contributors: women underrepresented
• average editor: 30 years old white male…
• not only represented in the contributors but also in the topics addressed and in how they are written about
• wider problem than just Wikipedia: women dismissed from writing [IMG How to supress women’s writing]
• Wikipedia: new and old way of working — rules/pillars
• problematics of representation on Wikipedia:
  • secondary sources (talk about) rather than primary (speaking oneself) > post-colonial studies, subaltern studies – 1 min [IMG secondary/primary sources]
  • based on a biased system (academic, legitimate publishing) => mostly written sources that exclude oral sources for instance – 1 min [IMG How to supress women’s writing]
  • basically: distinction between stories and history / oral and written

Myriam 10 mins 
-- slide: oral history essay
- When we talk about oral history on wikipedia, the fact that it is actually very hard to find information about the official position of wikipedia on the subject already tells a lot
- Appart from the encyclopedic article on the topic ''oral history'', all we found was conversations scattered in different talk pages, a few projects trying to adress the subject and 
- an ''essay page'' on Oral history, which is a page written by members exposing opinions or advice on the platform though it doesn't have a status as strong as official guidelines

• - On this page it says ''On Wikipedia, oral history is simply not permissible, as are citations of oral history... Wikipedia should contain no efforts, projects, policies, assistance, or essays which attempt to address the issue of recording oral history, and any issues arising between oral history and Wikipedia relying only on published sources.'' 
• - The article is so drastic that it is hard to say if it's not being ironic, but it also reveals that it's a touchy subject!
• 
  

-- slide: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
- Anyways, it seems as though the Wikipedia community suffers a bit from an inferiority complex and is scared to death of not being percieved as a serious and reliable encyclopedia. It even has it's own wikipedia page to prove it is

-- slide welcome to wikipedia
- That's why it fears anything that could question the three core content policies : ''Neutral point of view'',  ''verifiability'' and ''no original research''. 
and oral history challenges all three of them!

• - ''All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.'' The term Neutral is of course problematic, and while the attempt to representent multiple viewpoint is interesting, we can see how some viewpoints can't get represented because there is no ''reliable source'' published on it

- Acording to these policies, Interviewing people about specific subjects and using this material directly as source is considered unreliable, because it's considered original research since it hasn't been published in other reliable media first. 

- So is wikipedia really the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, well not without written sources!

- The Oral Citations Project is a interesting research project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation grant to help overcome a lack of published material in emerging languages on Wikipedia and explores ways by which alternative methods of citation can be employed when formal printed/textual sources for a commonplace object of lived knowledge do not exist.

- ''The problem with the sum of human knowledge, however, is that it is far greater than the sum of printed knowledge.'' - User:Aprabhala

-- slide statistics
- Publishing is not equally accessible in all countries for financial or cultural reasons
these stats show this clearly: 

• - The total production of books in all languages from the UK, South Africa and India in 2005:
  • UK: 161 000 books / 60 million people
  • South Africa: 6 100 books / 48 million people
  • India: 97 000 books / 1 100 million people
• If we were to measure books produced in 2005 per person per country, the comparison is more stark:
  • UK: 1 book per 372 people
  • South Africa: 1 book per 7 869 people
  • India: 1 book per 11 371 people

- Even though the project got funding by the wikimedia foundation, it still is meeting a lot of resistance from many people in the Wikipedia community
- (By the way we also got funding from wikimedia specifically to adress the gender gap, and it doesn't shelter us from having our edits removed and being told it's not the place to talk about gender equality)

- In the discussion page of the project a wikipedian said ''Just because something is true[1], doesn't mean it belongs in Wikipedia.'' and would rather give up on the original aspiration of gathering all the world's knowledge in one place, than creating what they see as a doorway for anyone to be able to record themselves and write unverifiable articles

--slide NY TIMES
- To illustrate, heres an quote from an article written about the instigator of the oral history project, Achal Prabhala:
'' In the case of dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children.
There is no doubt, he said, that the article would have been deleted from English Wikipedia if it didn’t have any sources to cite. Those are the rules of the game, and those are the rules he would like to change, or at least bend, or, if all else fails, work around - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/08/business/media/a-push-to-redefine-knowledge-at-wikipedia.html

- So it seems like there might be some differences in how the content policies are applied according to the different languages platform where we might find some wiggle room
- The project suggests conducting interviews, which could then be used as source material to cite
- Some users are proposing to post these interviews first in a sister platform called wikinews, because while  No original research is a policy in Wikipedia, Original reporting is a policy in Wikinews. By having these oral sources first published online and checked with the Accreditation policy we can assume the reliability of the interview, they could then become reliable sources to cite on wikipedia

-As of now oral citations are still considered to be illustrations in articles, but the dialogue is opened to find solutions

• (Mia)  5 min
• (slide) So as you can see, if oral sources are merely considered illustrations of written sources, 
• this is a problem if we are going to write history in a way that does not leave out marginalized groups.
• So, as we in JFTR are looking into how gender is represented in the recording of history, I thought it would be relevant to look into what Women's oral history actually is
• And why it is special.
• And what is the history of women's oral history.

• Here on the table we have books, Resources from RoSa - documentation centre on women's liberation movement, gender and sexuality in Belgium.
  • Specifically on Women's oral history-history - book - which you can look closer at afterwards if you want :)
    • Women's Oral History : The Frontiers Reader, collection of 19 essays, edited by Susan H Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon.

• So where does this come from, talking about women's oral history as something seperate?
• It basically started with women outside of academia challenging the traditional concepts of writing history. 
  • The reason was that historians writing about women needed barely to scratch the surface, before they could see that there simply is not enough sources, written sources, on women's history - that goes for women's history and also other marginalized groups - so they simply had to turn elsewhere for their information.
  • Therefore oral history and oral sources were used to reconstruct our own past and reality - and to create identity - 
  • It is after all, from a historical perspective, relatively recent that women are leading public lives - 
  • So this book contains a quote:
  • (Slide) Woman's eyes - what does it mean to learn our common symbols, preen them, and share them with the world. 
  • ' (Ntozake Shange - American playwright and poet, afro-feminist)
  • Perhaps it means identifying what is historically important, and questioning how it is defined as such.

• This brings us to a matter of two definitions that one will encounter as soon as one engages in the topic of oral history. 
• It is Oral History vs Oral tradition - a western definition and perspective
  • (slide) I quote wikipedia "The term Oral History is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else, but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition."
  • "Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories."
    • Let's replace primitive with "certain societies" and it seems that groups of people that do not have written sources either by choice or need or a combination, seem to rely on oral tradition. 
    • But this is not what is considered Oral History.

• The modern, western concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.
• One could say that Allan Nevins development of the method of oral sources brought oral history to academia. 
• is the collection and study of historical information about individuals,  families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes,  videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. 
• It could somehow be seen as the organizing and contextualisation of recorded material.
• But it can also "academi'fy" the rules of what is considered oral tradition and what is considered a source of history.

• (slide)Which is why women's oral history over the last almost 100 years has developed in a special direction, significantly that it has over time developed into a field of its own, and primarly through the work of women outside of the major universities or oral history centers, working for raising the status of the stories that women pass on to each other that seem to have been left out of the written publications.

• Women's oral history has developed in the structure of a grassroot movement, not in a centralised manner.
• If we want to explore how to work with women's oral history we will have to make tools and platforms that can work with grassroots / un-centralised movements.
• Which is why an online platform could have a lot of potential in this field. 
• For years women have been socialised to be bearers of culture and tradition, symbolically in our society, a woman makes a home, carries on tradition, while at the same time in the records of said tradition we seem to be missing, or only represented by a few. 
• In this book, Unsung Heroes, silent giants, they give some tips on how to start working with women's oral history, and they say to first position yourself in your own oral tradition.
• Ask yourselves: Can you think of any oral herstory which has been handed down to you and in which context? Stories of women in your family? Expressions and sayings about women? Think about it for now, and we will come back to it later this evening. 
• (Slide)Easy to write off these things as unimportant. As chitchat, as everyday minutea, as: 
• Gossip

• (Mia and Loraine) - 2 min
  • oral stories have always been underestimated, pejorated: with the use of terms like “gossips”, “jasette” [IMG revue Sorcières], “faire des histoires” [IMG Les Faiseuses d’histoires]
  • but they have also been re-appropriated [IMG gossip, quote, consciousness-raising], as specific tool/strategies for communication, transmission and activism [IMG chants at Greenham Commons - > We have some on the table]
  • Ramaya Tegegne, Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz, Marbriers 4, 2014. Tegegne uses the concept of ‘gossip’ – not simply as a means of communication but as a speculative mode of thought and a productive  force – to create new ways of collectively thinking through the dynamics  of trust, intimacy and sharing.
  • In her essay ‘Witch-Hunt,’ for Tank magazine, artist Hannah Black frames gossip both as a language of  female resistance and as an indispensable form of emotional labor. She  writes: “Gossip has always been a secret language of friendship and resistance between women” + “Hatred of gossip is hatred of women talking to each other—it is  generally women who do this work of love…. Communities of gossips nurse  each other through the degradations that partners, bosses and families inflict on us.” For marginalized people, gossip has a dual function: it  works to both affirm communal bonds and unsettle the positions of those  in power.
• These projects show a wide range of how to think about oral history and oral tradition, but how to _________ it? Over to you, Sarah!

Sarah - 7min

• However there is few written history while many oral histories in relation to the diversity of the world.
• written history says only one side story, while oral history is shapes by gender, race and class. and shows then a diversity of view on "reality". Men remember history differently than women, managers tha workers and they re-tell all their stories differently

• Alternative ways to treat oral sources and how they deal with oral sources: (Wiki Africa?)
  • Wikiafrica
    • (as Myriam said) Lack of diversity of sources and taking written source as reference makes an unbalanced sum of the human knwoledge and put aside some cultures, countries and even continent where history is mostly based on oral sources. Africa for exemple. 
    • Some initiatives like http://www.wikiafrica.org/  try to enhence the siatuation but without adressing the problematic of oral source inclusion into wikipedia. 
    • Project is mainly based on creating a wiki communaty and aditing articles on "Africa".
    • It is international movement that encourages individuals and organisations to create, expand and enhance online content on Wikipedia about Africa.
    • no specific reflexion on diversity of sources and oral history
  • Internet archive https://archive.org/
    • it is a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form
    • anyone can upload
    • sound, video and text are accessible at the same level, you can filter your search but everyths is at the same level
    • way back machine
  • British Library Sounds http://sounds.bl.uk/
    • is part of the british library collection
    • oral source and sound are treated as a specific project, on another page of the website, I guess to emphasise those sources
  • Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations http://cbbg.brooklynhistory.org/listen
    • is project of the urban history center called Brooklyn historical society, its goal is to create space for public dialogues about race, ethnicity, and intersecting identities
    • it is a sharing knowledge place, there's a section gathering ressources and tools to learn and discuss about brooklyn diversity of culture.
    • specific section with oral sources, way of describing the diversity and complexity of this place
  • http://shtooka.net/  database of audio recordings of words and sentences.
  • Media Fandom Oral History Project https://fanlore.org/wiki/Media_Fandom_Oral_History_Project
    • Is an audio record of media fans telling their fandom history in their own words.
    • It is using wiki sftware so llok like wikipedia
    • it also stuctured the same way and got a set of rules as wikipedia, or as a comparaison
    • fanlore with Plural Point of View in opposition the Neutral Point of View in Wikipedia policie
      • Fanlore is not a traditional encyclopedia that strives to establish a single account of events (as in "Neutral Point of View"). In addition to bare facts, we acknowledge that the history of fandom is a collection of personal experiences and interpretations, many of them only passed along as part of an oral tradition. Because of this, those multiple experiences and opinions are important, and we want to collect and document them as part of our fact set.

Material and resources: 
(which means that it would be interesting if it was mentioned as a specific type of oral history on the wikipedia article about oral history)
Templates for naming audio-files on Wikipedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:List_of_audio_templates_for_the_Wikipedias/list#EN.wikipedia.org
oral history sources:

• Wikimedia produced documentary around oral history sources (good place for numbers) https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/people-are-knowledge  and 
• Telling our stories: feminist debates and the use of oral history: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09612029400200046
• the feminist practice of oral history Women's Words is the first collection of writings devoted exclusively to exploring the theoretical, methodological, and practical problems that arise when women utilize oral history as a tool of feminist scholarship. In thirteen multi-disciplin ary esays, the book takes stock of the implicit presuppositions , contradictions, and prospects of oral history at the hands of feminist scholars.
• wikipedia sounds list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list
• wikipedia voice project: A project to make audio recordings in which Wikipedia subjects speak their name and introduce themselves https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Voice_intro_project

Sharing knowledge orally

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising
  • Consciousness raising groups were formed by New York Radical Women, an early Women's Liberation group in New York City, and quickly spread throughout the United States. In November 1967, a group including Shulamith Firestone, Anne Koedt, Kathie Sarachild (originally Kathie Amatniek), and Carol Hanisch began meeting in Koedt's apartment. Meetings often involved "going around the room and talking" about issues in their own lives. 
• Importance of word of mouth to share / get access to certain kind of underground knowledges sharing information
  • ex: Anne Smolar sharing her knowledge about movies, comenting on the difficulty to find it especially before internet
  • still now: seach engines will show more meanstream or popular knowledge first

Privileged access to writing history

• If you have difficult or no access to writing, how do you pass knowledge on? 
  • In considering literature written by women during the last few centuries in Europe and the United States (I’m going to con­centrate on literature in English, with some examples drawn from other literature and from painting), we don’t find the absolute prohibition on the writing of women qua women that has (for example) buried so much of the poetic and rhetorical tradition of black slave America, although many of the same devices are used to trivialize the latter when it does get written down; James Bal­dwin’s “long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer”1can be easily dealt with by a majority culture in which what is written down is what counts. The fragments that remain are dealt with largely by simply ignoring them, though when such things do surface, more sophisticated methods— to be discussed below—come into play. (For example, education was at first against the law. Then, after emancipation, it became rare, inferior, and unfunded. Such is progress.) - How to suppress women's writing, Joanna Russ p. 8 (the whole book is available on the owncloud jftr library)

wikipedia requests

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requested_recordings
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Audio_and_video_requests

Chanting:

• Hymne du MLF : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIE9HtFv0fc
• http://www.thesuffragettes.org/resources/anthems/

audio archive:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxmbie8dfkI
• https://www.buzzfeed.com/adolfoflores/people-are-calling-this-song-the-anthem-of-the-womens-march?utm_term=.oj6R05al0Z#.viGoNx7dNK
• women's audio archive: http://www.marysialewandowska.com/waa/
• http://hernoise.org/
• https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/
• http://herstories.prattinfoschool.nyc/omeka/
• Feminist Protest Songs: Jacqueline Hoàng Nguy?n with Amalle Dublon https://vimeo.com/214316704
• Greenham Common: http://www.yourgreenham.co.uk/

Video:

• The Woman’s Building History: Betty Gordon ''I wasn't speaking much before'' http://thewomansbuilding.org/videos.html

Slogans:
http://www.foleffet.com/40-ANS-DE-SLOGANS-FEMINISTES

Keywords we have been using to search for things: 
- Protest Slogans
- Oral History
- Chanting
- Protest songs
- Banners 
- Alternative history sources
- Ways of recording