Oral History and Archives in the New South Africa: Methodological Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
La flambée d'intérêt pour l'histoire orale en Afrique du Sud soulève plusieurs questions d'ordre méthodologique pour les archivistes.Les approches existantes en histoire orale, qu'elles soient folkloriques, historiques ou plus centrées sur la communauté et l'identité, abordent rarement la question de savoir si les histoires orales devaient être traitées comme des documents et, le cas échéant, quelle serait la meilleure façon de les évaluer.Cet article s'attache à ces questions et conclut en plaidant pour davantage de souplesse et de créativité dans l'évaluation des histoires orales.ABSTRACT The upsurge of interest in oral history in South Africa raises a series of methodological questions for archivists.Existing approaches to oral history, whether folkloric, historical, or more focussed on community and identity, have rarely asked whether oral histories should function as records and, if so, how they should be appraised.This essay explores these questions and concludes with a call for more flexible, creative approaches to appraising oral histories.Oral history in South Africa is experiencing an upsurge initiated by community and academic groups, 1 and embraced by the new government.2 This active commitment by the state to collect oral history is nearly unprecedented.In other post-war or post-trauma situations, it is usually victim groups or * This article grew out of a 1999 trip to South Africa sponsored by the University of Michigan School of Information and funded in part by the Kellogg Foundation.Professor Margaret Hedstrom of the School of Information critiqued a term paper on oral history that was subsequently expanded and developed under the guidance of Terry Cook (Visiting Professor at the School of Information, winter term 2000).The author is also grateful for the helpful criticism of three anonymous reviewers.Web sites are valid as of summer 2001. 1 While the author did not visit all these projects, they include the District Six Museum, the Western Cape Oral History Project (see
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.042 | 0.085 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".