{"id":80121,"date":"2017-10-23T20:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T20:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/product\/uncategorized\/oral-history-mapping-with-arcgis-online\/"},"modified":"2018-04-20T19:59:02","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T19:59:02","slug":"oral-history-mapping-with-arcgis-online","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/\/uncategorized\/oral-history-mapping-with-arcgis-online","title":{"rendered":"Oral History Mapping with ArcGIS Online"},"author":7231,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[],"tags":[27871],"industry":[],"product":[36611],"class_list":["post-80121","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-story-map-cascade","product-story-maps"],"acf":{"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

This is a guest post by Sam Raby. A freelance mapmaker, Sam created Placing Oral Histories<\/a><\/strong> under contract with the Esri Story Maps<\/a> team.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

My first attempt at creating an \u201coral history map\u201d was with a project I worked on documenting my family\u2019s escape from Iraq. My whole life, I had heard bits and pieces of their story of displacement but never had a chance to record it, and in 2015, I finally got an opportunity to create a permanent archive of it as part of an independent school project.<\/p>\n

Given my obsession with geography, I wanted to preserve not only the oral histories of my family\u2019s escape, but also the places and spaces that marked their journey to the US. I came to a realization through developing the project that mapping these stories brought out a crucial component that would have been lost in words alone \u2014 it carried my family\u2019s story out of the ambiguously defined image of the \u201cMiddle East\u201d and into the real world. Placing Oral Histories<\/a>, a project I developed in conjunction with Esri Story Maps, is essentially a recreation of the project I did with my own family\u2019s story. It is a further exploration of how we can use maps to humanize refugee oral histories.<\/p>\n

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Click the image above to launch “Placing Oral Histories” in a new tab.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This post will walk through the methods I used in creating \u201cPlacing Oral Histories.\u201d No previous experience with GIS software and\/or ArcGIS Online is required. Keep in mind that there are infinitely many ways to capture geography when telling someone\u2019s story, so I encourage you to use this method as a starting point for developing your own ideas with oral history mapping.<\/p>\n

1. Recording the Oral History First<\/strong><\/p>\n

My process developing \u201cPlacing Oral Histories\u201d started with in-person interviews I conducted with Syrian refugees living in the European diaspora. As preserving the oral part of these oral histories was important to the project, I used audio recording software on my personal computer to record my verbal interviews, and I later transcribed them. I specifically used QuickTime Player<\/a> to record the audio, an app that is standard on all recent Mac OS X operating systems, but any type of audio recording software or device would have worked just as well.<\/p>\n

I experimented with two different interview methods during this process, and one very clearly worked better than the other:<\/p>\n