About

This inventory includes a compilation of data gathered from local institutions with oral histories and therefore reflects the diversity of the institutions that provided the information. The amount of information associated with each oral history varied depending on the institution and is therefore why not all entries are complete. Similarly, the organization of this data varied by institution, meaning the data categories had to be created based on commonalities among the information given in order to create a uniform inventory. That said, if an institution provided information that was not associated with the inventory categories, that information was put into the description category in order to not be lost.

It is important to note that the extent of this inventory attempts to reflect oral histories, which generally refers to interviews with people regarding their personal knowledge and experiences. (According to the Oral History Association, “Oral history refers to both the interview process and the products that result from a recorded spoken interview (whether audio, video, or other formats).” This definition continues to highlight the importance of a “dynamic, collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the narrator.”) Therefore, some information provided by institutions that did not fit this definition was not included in the database. Examples of material not included includes recordings of academic or historical lectures, newspaper articles, television ads or public service announcements, or meeting recordings. Some items in the inventory still may be outside of the scope of an oral history despite the effort to remove some.

When working with oral histories, one should consider the potential limitations with respect to oral histories as a historical resource. Specifically, oral histories reflect the particular perspective of the person being interviewed, while also reflecting the perspective of the interviewer who guided the conversation. Interviewees also tell stories in oral histories through their memory, which, while a valuable source of knowledge, can also be flawed. Such considerations should be taken into account when considering all types of historical sources, including the oral histories found through this inventory.

Thank you to all of the people at the institutions who provided information to complete the inventory - this could not exist without you!

The scope of the counties involved in the Southwest 250-150 narrowed down the desired locations to include in the inventory. That said, oral histories themselves are not constrained to one location and therefore do not follow the contraints of the project, addressing locations outside of the eight counties. It was decided to work to tag all locations mentioned within Colorado, as the data for those oral would not need to be adjusted in case the project expanded. That said, oral histories in collections that were clearly outside of the geographic scope of this project were removed from the database, including those from the Center of Southwest Studies discussing forestry or Indigenous people in distant states. Some oral histories in the inventory may still be outside of the geographic scope, but with unknown information most were kept.

Using the Southwest 250-150 counties as boundaries also meant that it was important to categorize oral history locations by county to connect counties to oral histories. Therefore, any town or city tagged included an associated county tag. This was particularly important when considering smaller or historic towns, as it was decided to not tag all small or historic towns but instead just tag the county. This decision was made to help limit the sorting options, though it could be changed if desired.

While the goal is to tag oral histories according to all locations, the search function only corresponds to locations within the region of the 8 counties in order to maintain the focus of Southwest Colorado.

Many oral histories in the database do not actually have any location tags because there would be no way to know locations without listening to the oral history. Also, there may be some locations mentioned within oral histories that were not originally known. If you would like to help make the data about locations more complete, please see the "Take Part" page!

Topic tagging is an inherently arbitrary process. However, it is helpful to make common concepts consistent. For instance, one searching "mining" would have to search anything related to mining - mining, mines, miners, etc. - to find results. With a tag, everything can be consistent and bundled in a group. That said, there is a balance in choosing the topics to tag. As part of the purpose is to make the data more simple and searchable, tagging every single topic would defeat the purpose by overcomplicating the search. But even with a large number of topics chosen to tag, it still feels like some are not getting acknowledged. In the end, topic tags hopefully represent the major topics of the region and its history and are always available for further refinement. See the description tab for more information about the description, which can be searched to attempt to find topics not included in tags.

As mentioned with the location tags, many oral histories in the database do not actually have any topic tags because there would be no way to know topics without listening to the oral history. Also, there may be some topics mentioned within oral histories that were not originally known. If you would like to help make the data about topics more complete, please see the "Take Part" page!

The database search function was created using Django, with some standardization and consolidation done using pandas, a python data anlysis library. The source code for the database search and the site as a whole can be found through this GitHub link.